This week on Chasing Curiosity we’re finishing up our What is Love series with a conversation with my very good friend Tarek. He presents his ideas on love in a wonderfully intellectual and thoughtful way.
Some of the quotes that Tarek references:
"Each being is distinct from all others. His birth, his death, the events of his life may have an interest, but he alone is directly concerned in them. He is born alone. He dies alone. Between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity. The gulf exists, for instance, between you, listening to me, and me, speaking to you. We are attempting to communicate, but communication can abolish our fundamental difference. If you die, it is not my death. You and I are discontinuous beings. But I cannot refer to this gulf which separates us without feeling that this is not the whole truth of the matter. It is a deep gulf, and I do not see how it can be done away with. None the less, we can experience its dizziness together. It can hypnotize us."
Bataille
"And I am writing here at the moment when my mother no longer recognizes me, and at which, though still capable of speaking or articulating, a little, she no longer calls me and for her and therefore for the rest of her life, I no longer have a name, that’s what’s happening, and when she nonetheless seems to reply to me, she is presumably replying to someone who happens to be me without her knowing it, if knowing means anything here, like the other day in Nice when I asked her if she was in pain (“yes”) then where? It was February 5 1989, she had in a rhetoric that could never have been hers, the audacity of this stroke about which she will alas, never know anything, no doubt knew nothing, and which, piercing the night replies to my question: “I have a pain in my mother”, as though she were speaking for me, both in my direction and in my place."
Derrida
"The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we're out in a country that has no language
no laws, we're chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years… we're driving through the desert
wondering if the water will hold out
the hallucinations turn to simple villages
the music on the radio comes clear-
neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdämmerung
but a woman's voice singing old songs
with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute
plucked and fingered by women outside the law."
12 Love Poems, Rich
"A young lad falls in love with a princess, the content of his whole life lies in this love, and the relationship is one that cannot possibly be brought into fruition...The slaves of misery… naturally exclaim 'such love is foolishness; the rich brewer's widow is just as good a match.'"
"He has grasped the deep secret that even in loving another one should be sufficient unto oneself."
"It is only lower natures who have the law for their actions in someone else, the premisses for their actions outside themselves."
"[The knight of faith] makes one more movement… he says 'I nevertheless believe that I will get her, namely on the strength of the absurd."
"The moment the knight resigned he was convinced of the impossibility, humanly speaking; that was the conclusion of the understanding… On this the knight of faith is just as clear; all that can save him is the absurd; and this he grasps by faith."
Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard