Status Updates From Aşk ve İrade

My psychoanalytic experience has made me dubious as to whether rational explanations ever quiet anxiety anyway; something else happens, namely, the explanation becomes the vehicle for another mythos that does grasp people on levels deper than rationality. The explanation, e.g. becomes part of the mythos that I, the one doing the explaining, care for you, that you and I can trust and communicate with each other.

Men feel plainly enough within their minds a heavy burden, whose
weight depresses them. If only they perceived with equal clearness the causes of this depression, the origin of this lump of evil within breasts, they would not lead such a life as we now see all too commonly—no one knowing what he really wants and everyone forever trying to get away from where he is as though mere locomotion could throw off the load.

Sentimentality is thinking about sentiment rather than genuinely
experiencing the object of it. Tolstoy tells of the ladies who cry at the theater but are oblivious to their own coachman sitting outside in the freezing cold. Sentimentality glories in the fact that I have this emotion; it begins subjectively and ends there. But care is always caring about something.

The fact that many people tend not to give themselves time to know each other in love affairs is a general symptom of the malaise of our day. We are the age, says John Galbraith referring to the motels along the highways, of “short order sex.”