Category: wisdom and folly

Someone who would throw your trust back in your face is garbage.

Far as I can tell, the three stages of baggage are: sadness that someone you trusted chose to hurt you; horror that you chose to trust someone so unworthy; fear that your judgment will fail you again.

You get over the betrayal by chucking the baggage — piece by piece. Accept that trusting always comes with a risk of abuse; that shame always rests with the abuser; and that the abuser wins only if you keep blaming everyone else — future partners, friends, Alan Greenspan, yourself. Let hindsight teach you the signs you missed that your boyfriend was not a nice guy. Then, when you’re ready, let yourself trust again.
-Carolyn Hax

I lived my life feeling alone. That’s just the way of it. I always did. As soon as I was old enough to have a feeling about it, I felt like I was alone. No matter how much I loved my family — and I actually got along better with my family than I think most people do — but I just always felt separate from everybody, and was terribly lonely all the time. I wasn’t living a life that was particularly different from anybody else’s, a pariah — it wasn’t like I didn’t have friends, but I just… we all of us are alone in our own minds, and I was very much aware of that from the very beginning of my life.
-Joss Whedon

In Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song the murderer Gary Gilmore writes from death row to his incarcerated girlfriend, “What is to become of us Nicole? I know you wonder. And the answer is simple: By love… we can become more than the situation.” That assertion of the power of passionate love by a despicable wretch exemplifies what I call erotic faith: an emotional conviction, ultimately religious in nature, that meaning, value, hope, and even transcendence can be found through love – erotically focused love, the kind of love we mean when we say that people are in love. (I use the term “erotic” not in its narrow sexual connotation but to indicate broadly libidinous desire and a passionate, sometimes romantic, relationship with, affection for, or attachment to another person.) Men and women in the hold of erotic faith feel that love can redeem personal life and offer a reason for being.

Because doubt about the value of love has always been a human constant, historically people have always needed some kind of faith. And with the spread of secularism since the eighteenth century, erotic faith, diverse and informal though it may be, has given to some a center and sometimes a solace that were traditionally offered by organized religion and God. By love we canchange the situation – that sentiment moves people: love relationships have had the highest priority in the real lives of millions as they have had for innumerable characters in fiction.

Erotic faith is not a new thing, a single thing, or a local phenomenon; but, long suppressed or expropriated by Christian and other religious orthodoxies, it has swept the world in modern times as never before. Gilmore’s words mark its popular appeal. “Despite the flood of poems, novels and plays on the themes of romantic appeal and sexual love,” says one historian, “they played little or no part in the daily lives of men and women of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” This is no longer so. Erotic love became an important basis of everyday faith in the nineteenth centurey, and – for good or ill – the evidence of erotic faith is all around.

-Robert M. Polhemus, Erotic Faith, “Faith, Love and the Art of the Novel: ‘The Feather Plucked from Cupid’s Wing'” pp 1-2

Divorce is difficult because it involves a purposeful and active rejection by another person, who, merely by living, is a daily symbol of the rejection.
-Paul Bohannan, Divorce and After

Thanking consists in receiving with embracing hands what is given, holding it together, and showing it to, sharing it with, others. Speaking and writing about what one has seen, and experienced – what one has been given – can be thoughtful, can be thankful. Thoughtful speaking and writing put forth the overall design and inner force of the data – the given – detailing their aspects and inner relationships for view, sharing them with others.

Thoughtfulness begins in opening one’s heart to what is given. It involves vulnerability and risk. Truth means seeing what exceeds the possibility of seeing, what is intolerable to see, what exceeds the possibility of thinking, Georges Bataille wrote. “And I would not know what is, what happens, if I did not know extreme pleasure, if I did not know extreme pain!”

In speaking one can put onself forth, to counteract one’s sense of vulnerability. But in thoughtful speech one instead seeks only to offer to others what one has been given to see. In thoughtful writing one loses sight of onself, and one writes not for a distinct person but for anyone. For a reader I am only a self-effaced one who offers what has been given to see and to celebrate or suffer.

But gratitude – thoughtfulness – can also silence all talk.
-Alphonso Lingis, Trust, “Reticence” pp 193