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We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.
true. I still think that if all we mean by our love is a craving to be loved, we are in a very deplorable state.
that if we mean only this craving we are mistaking for love something that is not love at all. I cannot now deny the name love to Need-love.
reality is more complicated
illusory feeling that it is good for us to be alone—is
No kind of riches is a passport to the Kingdom of Heaven.
the sort of love for a man’s country which is worked up by beer and brass bands will not lead him to do much harm (or much good) for her sake. It will probably be fully discharged by ordering another drink and joining in the chorus.
since to ‘like’ anything means to take some sort of pleasure in it, we must begin with pleasure.
pleasures can be divided into two classes; those which would not be pleasures at all unless they were preceded by desire, and those which are pleasures in their own right and need no such preparation.
Need-pleasure is the state in which Appreciative pleasures end up when they go bad (by addiction).
Pleasures of Appreciation are very different. They make us feel that something has not merely gratified our senses in fact but claimed our appreciation by right.
Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: ‘We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.’ Need-love says of a woman ‘I cannot live without her’; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection—if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.
If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute.
you are too busy spoiling a dog’s life to spoil theirs.
Those who say ‘The more I see of men the better I like dogs’—those who find in animals a relief from the demands of human companionship—will be well advised to examine their real reasons.
Affection produces happiness if—and only if—there is common sense and give and take and ‘decency’. In other words, only if something more, and other, than Affection is added.
You need ‘common sense’, that is, reason. You need ‘give and take’; that is, you need justice,
Can Mrs Fidget really have been quite unaware of the countless frustrations and miseries she inflicted on her family?
She continued all these practises because if she had dropped them she would have been faced with the fact she was determined not to see; would have known that she was not necessary.
the very laboriousness of her life silenced her secret doubts as to the quality of her love. The more her feet burned and her back ached, the better, for this pain whispered in her ear, ‘How much I must love them if I do all this!’ That is the second motive.
enabled her to feel ill-used, therefore, to have a continual grievance, to enjoy the pleasures of resentment. If anyone says he does not know those pleasures, he is a liar or a saint. It is true that they are pleasures only to those who hate.
To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue.
Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without Friendship.
The deepest and most permanent thought of those ages was ascetic and world-renouncing. Nature and emotion and the body were feared as dangers to our souls, or despised as degradations of our human status. Inevitably that sort of love was most prized which seemed most independent, or even defiant, of mere nature.
To say ‘These are my friends’ implies ‘Those are not’.
though it cannot be proved, can never of course be refuted.
The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden. Yes—if it exists at all. But we must first prove its existence. Otherwise we are arguing like a man who should say,
‘If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it.’
in classical logic, know as the fallacy of affirming the consequent. It occurs when a person draws a conclusion that if the consequent is true, then the antecedent must also be true (if A then B and B is true, therefore A must be true.)
This pleasure in co-operation, in talking shop, in the mutual respect and understanding of men who daily see one another tested, is biologically valuable.
many people when they speak of their ‘friends’ mean only their companions.
When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass—may pass in the first half-hour—into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
It has not pleased God that the distinction between a sin and a duty should turn on fine feelings. This act, like any other, is justified (or not) by far more prosaic and definable criteria; by the keeping or breaking of promises, by justice or injustice, by charity or selfishness, by obedience or disobedience.
Venus, a late complication and development of the immemorial biological impulse.
There may be those who have first felt mere sexual appetite for a woman and then gone on at a later stage to ‘fall in love with her’. But I doubt if this is at all common. Very often what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved—a general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality. A man in this state really hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself.
man prowling the streets, that he ‘wants a woman’. Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).
Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman.
No lover in the world ever sought the embraces of the woman he loved as the result of a calculation, however unconscious, that they would be more pleasurable than those of any other woman.
Eros, a Need, at its most intense, sees the object most intensely as a thing admirable in herself, important far beyond her relation to the lover’s need.
What he fears is pre-occupation, the need of constantly ‘pleasing’—that is, considering—one’s partner, the multiple distractions of domesticity. It is marriage itself, not the marriage bed, that will be likely to hinder us from waiting uninterruptedly on God.
The gnat-like cloud of petty anxieties and decisions about the conduct of the next hour have interfered with my prayers more often than any passion or appetite whatever.
We must go back to our Bibles. The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the Church—read on—and gave his life for her (Eph. 5:25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is—in her own mere nature—least lovable.
(The for here is like the for in ‘He can’t have gone out, for his hat is still hanging in the hall’; the presence of the hat is not the cause of his being in the house but a probable proof that he is.)
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one,
no risk; no gain.
