{"id":2447,"date":"2020-02-11T00:10:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-11T08:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/?p=2447"},"modified":"2020-02-11T00:19:04","modified_gmt":"2020-02-11T08:19:04","slug":"valentines-day-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/2020\/02\/11\/valentines-day-blues\/","title":{"rendered":"Valentine’s day blues"},"content":{"rendered":"
A few words for the solitary lovers, longing for the other, there, distant, imaginary or adversary.<\/div>\n
Feelings come in many flavors, and women tell it best.<\/div>\n
\n
You\u2019re still a young man\/woman.<\/div>\n
It\u2019s not too late to learn how to unwind.<\/div>\n
Who said<\/div>\n
you have to take it on the chin?<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Let me have your abyss.<\/div>\n
I\u2019ll cushion it with sleep.<\/div>\n
You\u2019ll thank me for giving you<\/div>\n
four paws to fall on.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Sell me your soul.<\/div>\n
There are no other takers.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
There is no other devil anymore.<\/div>

Wis\u0142awa Szymborska – Advertisement<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ben Aronson<\/p>\n<\/div>

<\/p>Freedom<\/p>\n

COULD I but ride indefinite,
\nAs doth the meadow-bee,
\nAnd visit only where I liked,
\nAnd no man visit me,<\/p>And flirt all day with buttercups,
\nAnd marry whom I may,
\nAnd dwell a little everywhere,
\nOr better, run away<\/p>With no police to follow,
\nOr chase me if I do,
\nTill I should jump peninsulas
\nTo get away from you,\u2014<\/p>I said, but just to be a bee
\nUpon a raft of air,
\nAnd row in nowhere all day long,
\nAnd anchor off the bar,\u2014
\nWhat liberty! So captives deem
\nWho tight in dungeons are.<\/p>Emily Dickinson, CII<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>

Husbands and lovers:<\/p>\n

Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover\u2014moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality\u2014that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar\u2014if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations. And, as in life, so in art both are necessary, husbands and lovers. It\u2019s a great pity when one is forced to choose between them.<\/p>Again, as in life, so in art: the lover usually has to take second place. In the great periods of literature, husbands have been more numerous than lovers; in all the great periods of literature, that is, except our own. Perversity is the muse of modern literature. Today the house of fiction is full of mad lovers, gleeful rapists, castrated sons\u2014but very few husbands. The husbands have a bad conscience, they would all like to be lovers. Even so husbandly and solid a writer as Thomas Mann was tormented by an ambivalence toward virtue, and was forever carrying on about it in the guise of a conflict between the bourgeois and the artist. But most modern writers don\u2019t even allow Mann\u2019s problem. Each writer, each literary movement vies with its predecessor in a great display of temperament, obsession, singularity. Modern literature is oversupplied with madmen of genius. No wonder, then, that when an immensely gifted writer, whose talents certainly fall short of genius, arises who boldly assumes the responsibilities of sanity, he should be acclaimed beyond his purely literary merits.<\/p>I speak of course, of Albert Camus, the ideal husband of contemporary letters. Being a contemporary, he had to traffic in the madmen\u2019s themes: suicide, affectlessness, guilt, absolute terror. But he does so with such an air of reasonableness, mesure<\/i>, effortlessness, gracious impersonality, as to place him apart from the others. Starting from the premises of a popular nihilism, he moves the reader\u2014solely by the power of his own tranquil voice and tone\u2014to humanist and humanitarian conclusions in no way entailed by his premises. This illogical leaping of the abyss to nihilism is the gift for which readers are grateful to Camus. This is why he evoked feelings or real affection on the part of his readers. Kafka arouses pity and terror, Joyce admiration, Proust and Gide respect, but no modern writer that I can think of, except Camus, has aroused love<\/strong>. His death in 1960 was felt as a personal loss by the whole literate world. […]<\/p>The Ideal Husband<\/a> \u2013 Susan Sontag<\/p><\/blockquote>

Dickinson again:<\/p>\n

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
\nOne clover, and a bee.
\nAnd revery.
\nThe revery alone will do,
\nIf bees are few.<\/p>Emily Dickinson \u2013 To make a prairie<\/p><\/blockquote>

Many contortions in the social order, what shall we do?<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>Mother, you sent me to piano lessons
\nAnd praised my arabesques and trills
\nAlthough each teacher found my touch
\nOddly wooden in spite of scales
\nAnd the hours of practicing, my ear
\nTone-deaf and yes, unteachable.
\nI learned, I learned, I learned elsewhere,
\nFrom muses unhired by you, dear mother,<\/p>I woke one day to see you, mother,
\nFloating above me in bluest air
\nOn a green balloon bright with a million
\nFlowers and bluebirds that never were
\nNever, never, found anywhere.
\nBut the little planet bobbed away
\nLike a soap-bubble as you called: Come here!
\nAnd I faced my traveling companions.<\/p>Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,
\nThey stand their vigil in gowns of stone,
\nFaces blank as the day I was born,
\nTheir shadows long in the setting sun
\nThat never brightens or goes down.
\nAnd this is the kingdom you bore me to,
\nMother, mother. But no frown of mine
\nWill betray the company I keep.<\/p>Sylvia Plath – The Disquieting Muses<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>

The mystery endures:<\/p>\n

The valley spirit never dies.
\nCall it mystery, the woman<\/p>The mystery, the Door of the Woman
\nis the root of heaven and earth<\/p>Forever this endures, forever
\nAnd all its uses are easy<\/p>Ursula Le Guin \u2013 What is complete<\/p><\/blockquote>

Whatever you do, don’t let go<\/p>\n

Their hearts grew cold
\nThey let their wings down<\/p>Sappho \u2013<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few words for the solitary lovers, longing for the other, there, distant, imaginary or adversary. Feelings come in many flavors, and women tell it best. You\u2019re still a young man\/woman. It\u2019s not too late to learn how to unwind. Who said you have to take it on the chin? Let me have your abyss. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-mood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2447"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2458,"href":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447\/revisions\/2458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}