23 April 2009
Quotes for R.
)Published on April 23rd, 2009 @ 07:46:56 pm, using 969 words, 257 views
There are quotes that dart through the sky of your mind like shooting stars during conversation but fail to materialize verbatim, the crux of which still manage to make their presence relevant and paraphrasing necessary. You can’t help but be as engrossed by them as you were by the conversation that summoned them and reach for the books they came from at the first opportunity. Seek and ye shall find.
Here they are, Robbie :D
Relationships might be said to have an inherent and cruel desire for self-balance. Looked at in terms of an equation, to keep two people together might require 40 units of effort [here labelled x] from both partners.
Alice 20x + Eric 20x = Relationship of 40x
40x would imply the relationship was a going concern, the cruel point was that the sum would not have to be equally paid. In only the most sensible liaisons would both parties cough up 20 units of effort; typically one party would make more effort than another. But how or why? How was the person who paid less chosen? By a very cynical sense of how much the other person cared. Each partner would intuitively weigh up the other, asking, ‘What is the minimum effort I can make? How far can I push the other to pay more than me before they refuse and love is lost?
For most of their relationship, Eric avoided paying his due because he knew Alice would pay when he didn’t. If he paid only 10 units, she would come up with the other 30. If he didn’t feel like driving over to her house, then she would come to his. If he didn’t wish to break a deadlock after an argument, he could count on her to play the mediator.
But he miscalculated just how far he could push Alice. Her share of the 40x began to slowly decline, leaving him to make up the shortfall. Only small amounts were at first involved, but they suffered remorseless inflation until the full weight of the relationship came to descend on his delicate shoulders.
Alice had in a myriad of ways simply ceased to care, and Eric realized that unless he continued to pump around 39x into the situation, Alice and he would inevitably collide and break up.
(The Romantic Movement - Alain de Botton)
‘A person is nothing but his image. (…)
As long as we live with other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does there exist another kind of direct contact between my self and their selves except through the mediation of eyes? Can we possibly imagine love without anxiously following our image in the mind of the beloved? When we are no longer interested in how we are seen by the person we love, it means we no longer love.’
(…)
‘It’s naïve to believe that our image is only an illusion that conceals our selves, as the one true essence independent of the eyes of the world. The imagologues have revealed with cynical radicalism that the reverse is true: our self is a mere illusion, ungraspable, indescribable, misty, while the only reality, all too easily graspable and describable, is our image in the eyes of others. And the worst thing about it is that you are not its master. First you try to paint it yourself, then you want at least to influence and control it, but in vain: a single malicious phrase is enough to change you forever into a depressingly simple caricature.’
(Immortality - Milan Kundera)
In our world, where there are more and more faces, more and more alike, it is difficult for an individual to reinforce the originality of the self and to become convinced of its inimitable uniqueness. There are two methods for cultivating the uniqueness of the self: the method of addition and the method of subtraction. Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura’s method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional attributes).
(…)
The method of addition is quite charming if it involves adding to the self such things as a cat, a dog, roast pork, love of the sea or of cold showers. But the matter becomes less idyllic if a person decides to add love for communism, for the homeland, for Mussolini, for Catholicism or atheism, for fascism or antifascism. In both cases the method remains exactly the same: a person stubbornly defending the superiority of cats over other animals is doing basically the same thing as one who maintains that Mussolini was the sole savior of Italy: he is proud of this attribute of the self and he tries to make this attribute (a cat or Mussolini) acknowledged and loved by everyone.
Here is the strange paradox to which all people cultivating the self by way of the addition method are subject: they use addition in order to create a unique, inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for the added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness (so painfully gained) quickly begins to disappear.
(Immortality - Milan Kundera)
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Quotes, conversation, Kundera, Botton, romantic, movement, immortality, verbatim, paraphrasing
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