An Australian court is hearing a case against a dating company which allegedly bilked lonely men of exorbitant sums to meet non-existent women. Some of their clients were newly bereaved, mentally handicapped, deaf or otherwise impaired. “A New Zealand man who had lost his wife to cancer paid more than $683,000, believing a woman named Angie wanted to marry him. He came to Australia for their wedding but she phoned to say she was flying to America, where her daughter had been in a car crash.” When he phoned the dating agency to apply for a refund, who should answer but “Angie”.
Among the 11 men claiming services did not eventuate or fell well short of what was promised are two with intellectual disabilities, one who is deaf and another who was pursued by debt collectors and attempted suicide. Two clients were promised nights out with Penthouse Pets. Three paid thousands of dollars to meet women on holiday in Fiji; the trips never went ahead.
Whether it is Moose Molloy looking for Velma or Anna seeking her Sailor From Gibraltar, a fair percentage of the world is evidently embarked on finding a cure for loneliness. Often they find the balm is worse than the disease. Derrick Bird, the British taxi driver who went on a shooting rampage, was allegedly pushed over the edge by a rejection from a Thai woman he met at the Spicy Girls A-go-go. Already deeply in debt, Bird gave her thousands of pounds in the expectation — who knows why expected it — that she would marry him.
Derrick Bird’s Thai lover dumped him by text message a few weeks before he went on his gun rampage, friends have revealed.
The overweight and balding 52-year-old was obsessed with the woman he knew only as ‘Hon’ and had sent her thousands of pounds.
He met the 32-year-old on holiday in Thailand three years ago and she had promised to move to England to be with him.
How can people make such blunders? Well they can if they’re looking to make them. The Indian Matrimonial website says “people always try to overcome their mistakes. Nobody wants to repeat mistakes everytime,” and offers them a chance to “marry again” through the services of their website. But in reality maybe the opposite is true. Perhaps people don’t want to break with an unhappy past so much as to relive it; to return to some point on the road to ruin and make the one change, the single alteration that would make it all turn out differently. It’s a condition that afflicts more than the mentally retarded or just the losers. For Jay Gatsby overcoming loneliness meant fixing the one thing that would make the ending different.
“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”
He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . .
. . . One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees–he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something–an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.
It wasn’t Daisy, but Velma that Moose was looking for that morning on Central Avenue when Philip Marlowe found him staring up at a joint that had always been seedy. He wasn’t looking out at the green light across the water, but he could have been Gatsby. He could have been anybody. Florian’s wasn’t called the Spicy Girls A-go-go, but it might have been.
It was a warm day, almost the end of March, and I stood outside the barber shop looking up at the jutting neon sign of a second floor dine and dice emporium called Florian’s. A man was looking up at the sign too. He was looking up at the dusty windows with a sort of ecstatic fixity of expression, like a hunky immigrant catching his first sight of the Statue of Liberty. He was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck. He was about ten feet away from me. His arms hung loose at his aides and a forgotten cigar smoked behind his enormous fingers.
Slim quiet Negroes passed up and down the street and stared at him with darting side glances. He was worth looking at. He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes. From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show handkerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie. There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he didn’t really need them. Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food. …
“I ain’t seen Velma in eight years,” he said in his deep sad voice. “Eight long years since I said goodby. She ain’t wrote to me in six. But she’ll have a reason. She used to work here. Cute she was. Let’s you and me go on up, huh?”
Dante believed that loneliness was the memory of happy times lost. And for perhaps that reason, the demand for love will always be greatest among those who have only heard rumor of it and glimpsed it, fleetingly, but once.
“No Way In” print edition at Amazon
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People want to be lied to.
People who tell the truth make others angry.
This isn’t particularly apropos to the subject, but I want to mention here how Fitzgerald is an absolute genius when writing about love and the turmoil, despair, joy and wonder of it. I have recently been working my way through an old favorite, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I am often in awe of his insight and the crystalline beauty of his prose. I want to put one quote here because it’s so simple, yet so shocking in the way it will send you back in memory to all those past loves you’ve had and that are now gone.
It’s from the story The Sensible Thing, itself a miracle of concision that manages to depict all the ups and downs of young love in 14 perfect pages. Anyway, here’s the quote:
There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.
Ponder that my friends. It makes you want to open a bottle of wine and spend the next couple of hours staring into a fire while your mind reels.
Peterike #2
“There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”
And what about loving God?
The wonder isn’t that on the internet so many dogs abound, nor even that they claim to be either Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. The wonder is that given the cloak of anonymity so many aggressively display their fleas. The Net is full of people who will log on with a name like “Pathetic Loser” and introduce themselves as either old or juvenile, as well as fat stupid unemployable and selfish, and then complain that no one wants to hear their opinions.
Some things can not be fixed by technology. Basic social development that depends on an intact family with a father and a competent education, both instilling self discipline and social competence, produces winners. Wanting to be the Internet answer to Charlie Sheen or Hugh Hefner proves you are a Loser.
Viktor Frankl was a man who something about love and loneliness. He also knew that without love we experience a sense of “meaninglessness” and that autonomy is highly overrated. The trick is to find that something to love which is worth the candle.
I poured us each an after dinner drink and she looked at me quizzically. “You have something to tell me,” she said. “Something’s bothering you. You’ve been distracted all evening.”
“I saw Claire. As real as you are. She asked me when I would be joining her.”
“It was just a dream, Alex.”
“I know. But it was more than that. I wrote a poem in my dream, and I woke up and wrote it down. The words are burnt into my mind. Could you live with me knowing I still have such memories?”
“Your memories belong to you, Alex, just as my memories belong to me. I was married, so I have memories too. Memories are part of us. May I see the poem?”
“I don’t have a copy, but I remember it. It went,
I saw her yet again last night
As radiant as then
With flowing hair and red red lips
And eyes that whispered when
She smiled a smile that took my breath
I tried to speak but no
I knew that love transcended death
I whispered please don’t go
She smiled again and turned away
I cried but she was gone
I lay awake and prayed for day
Just hoping that the dawn
Would find me still in blessed sleep
To dream and dream again
Of flowing hair and red red lips
And eyes that whispered when.”
“That was more than light verse, Alex. That was beautiful. And now you think that the whispered when meant she was asking when were you joining her.”
“What else could it mean?”
“It was a dream, Alex. It meant nothing.”
Snippet from PHILLY STREETS by Walter Erickson
Oh, and if whatever it is costs money, it probably isn’t love.
@3no mo uro
“And what about loving God?”
My guess is it’s probably just as vulnerable to intoxication and just as devastating when betrayed. It’s all in how you look at it.
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye,
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
W.B. Yeats
So much of what passes for love is nothing more than unfulfilled need forgot. When I was giving pre-nuptial counseling to couples, and then watched the course of so many marriages, I saw this time and again. Each trying to extract the juice of fulfillment from an echo of the past attached to these living people. “Most people,” I told them, “fall in love with and marry one of their parents, the one from whom they needed most and got least.” They looked at me like I was crazy, but too polite to say so, knowing full well that it certainly didn’t apply to them. They were in LOVE. Then the war began.
In these days marriage has become a fairy tale, a fantasy, a carefully choreographed initiation whose sentimental gingerbread is expected to sustain the happy couple for a lifetime. When the opening banquet is gone to the sewers, the sweetness dimmed and soured, then love is pronounced dead and its off to the races again. Many simply resume the search for the magic other who will meet all their needs without having to be asked, and without expecting return. These elder adolescents blunder about the world in a narcissistic frenzy where they dominate the pedestals of cultural idealism. Some wander alone, defeated and hopeless. Some turn to God for aught else they need, and figure out that all that is given is the gift, not more, share what they have in return, and it enough.
But it ain’t easy.
Make of it what you will.
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
@10 allen
That’s a great example of what Thomas Sowell was talking about when he called Marx a brilliant propagandist. It’s a lovely, lyrical expression of an meaningless statement.
Love is the most addictive thing in the world, one taste and you’re hooked forever.
Love. Yep.
When the last one that counted left after several drunken, stoned years, slave to her addctions (in remission when she came to live here), I told her, “The next time I want something to pat, I’ll get a dawg”.
8 years ago.
I’ve gotten used to it.
Murphy the Monk.
Still love ‘em but cannot lead a meaningful life with any gal I know.
I’ve got a good dawg. She barks if anyone comes up the road.
Needed the warning when the last one changed her mind after leaving and kept climbing the gate stoned, pissed, and pissed off, walking half a mile in the dark to show up at 0230 to express her displeasure.
She sho did put the others in the shade, though, including the mother of my kids.
Peace and a meaningful life more important to me at this stage of my life.
But, still…
heheheheheh
A joke here…
A man buys himself a new Corvette and is out driving it hard just after work one Friday. He sees a deserted stretch of road and decides to really let it out. And shortly thereafter he spies a flashing light in his rear view mirror.
“Oh crap!”, he says. “A cop! But I’ll bet I can outrun him. There’s no one else out here anyway.”
So he hammers down, but the cop, after falling back at first, starts catching up. Then the guy realizes just how stupid he is behaving, slows down, and pulls over.
A weary-looking highway patrolman walks up to his door and says, “Okay, we both know what you did. I wasn’t even chasing you when you saw my lights before you started speeding up. And it’s after my shift, and it’s a Friday, so if you can give me a good excuse as to why you sped up when you saw me I’ll let you go.”
The Corvette driver thinks for a minute and replies “My wife left me for a policeman a couple of weeks back and I thought you were he, bringing her back.”
The cop says “Have a good weekend, and don’t drive too fast.”
Happy VE Day Belmont Clubbers!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_Pobedy
Victory Day, it was so far
Like an ember dwindled in the faded fire.
Versts[2] were there, burnt and dusted, —
We did all we could for hastening this day.
Chorus:
This Victory Day
Saturated with the smell of gunpowder,
This is a holiday
With gray hairs on temples,
This is joy
With tears in our eyes,
Victory Day!
Victory Day!
Victory Day!
Days and nights at open-hearth furnaces
Our Motherland spent, sleepless.
Days and nights we fought a hard battle,
We did all we could for hastening this day.
Chorus
Hello, Mom, not all of us came back…
Wish to run about barefoot in dew!
Half of Europe, we have stridden half the Earth,
We did all we could for hastening this day.
Den’ Pobedy, kak on byl ot nas dalyok,
Kak v kostre potukhshem tayal ugolyok.
Byli vyorsty, obgorelye, v pyli —
Etot den’ my priblizhali kak mogli.
Chorus:
Etot Den’ Pobedy
Porokhom propakh,
Eto prazdnik,
S sedinoyu na viskakh.
Eto radost’
So slezami na glazakh.
Den’ Pobedy!
Den’ Pobedy!
Den’ Pobedy!
Dni i nochi u martenovskikh pechey,
Ne smykala nasha Rodina ochey.
Dni i nochi bitvu trudnuyu veli, —
Etot den’ my priblizhali kak mogli.
Chorus
Zdravstvuy, mama, vozvratilis’ my ne vse,
Bosikom by probezhat’sya po rose!
Pol-Yevropy proshagali, pol-Zemli —
Etot den’ my priblizhali kak mogli.
It’s unusual that the comments rival the original post in Belmont Club, but this time I think the two are about equal. Amazing place, this club, with much good commentary all around. Thanks to all who posted. ‘Twas a good read.
9. Tamquan:
I’ve seen quite a bit of that “marrying the parent,” I sometimes think of it as the “Johnny Carson” syndrome. He repeatedly married petite outgoing brunettes who were outgoing and liked to party, Just like his mother. Several fortunes later he married a blonde.
What is sad is people who are from abusive families tend to marry people like the abuser. “I’ll do it right this time and they’ll love me.” Women who have been sexually abused are impossible to deal with unless they are willing to get professional help. It is sad the number who won’t.
Sorry–I feel pity for these people. Loneliness is a hunger of the soul. And like hunger if not sated it leads to a peculiar and painful type of starvation. And in its last stages the starving will trade anything and everything they have for a scrap of connection to another human being, or even merely the chance of it.
And so they often become the prey of the wicked and opportunistic. And yes, often the victims do know at some level that their actions are stupid, like spending your life savings on playing the lottery. But you cannot win if you do not play.
1. Langley.
“People want to be lied to.
People who tell the truth make others angry.”
Yes. Reality is not something one wants to face.
But truth tellers too can use the truth as a bludgeon
Blast From the Past said:
“Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!” Man Oh Man ain’t that the truth! But THAT is all time thread winner!
peterike quoted Fitzgerald above: “There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.” Well, Duh! There are no two persons alike. I never understood why so many think F Scott so erudite when he mostly merely states the obvious.
If love seeks to fill the emptiness of ones soul it is not love but need. Love is outward directed. It is not about ones own needs but fulfilling another’s.
That being said, most just need human connection. Human touch. Babies need to be touched by their mothers. They have a visceral need to be touched, held. That really never leaves us. A massage from a trusted other, even if purchased, can heal many things, fill many needs. It can be restorative if one is open to the effects.
There is a guy who writes a website nomarriage.com. He makes some good points about what can be just as fulfilling for those that do not have real connections, real love with others. Buy a medium priced hooker once or twice a month to fulfill certain needs. He also makes good points reinforced by Tamquam above. Most in this society are so dang selfish they are looking to fulfill personal needs not share themselves selflessly in a loving relationship. Part and parcel of that situation is the lack of selfless love by so many for the greater things of this world. IOW, G-D. No rudders to guide them so they sail through life bumping into others on the seas of life, mostly wreaking havoc and destroying themselves and others.
Perhaps people don’t want to break with an unhappy past so much as to relive it; to return to some point on the road to ruin and make the one change, the single alteration that would make it all turn out differently.
Perhaps that applies to international politics too. The United States had an arrangement with Pakistan during the 1980’s to supply an Afghan uprising against the Soviet Union. That relationship has turned out extremely badly. The problem now is that our political leaders seem to be acting like Charlie Brown, so hooked on that dream of scoring a field goal that he trusts Lucy every time. Getting help from Pakistan is like getting help from a Jinn – every wish you make will get plausibly misinterpreted.
We have real enemies within the Pakistani government, enemies who regard it as their religious and patriotic duty to do everything within their power to do us in. Their attitude toward the United States is analogous to the contempt the Freikorps held for the Weimar Republic. The Freikorps killed Communists and murdered labor organizers with abandon, but they felt their bitterest hatred toward their Republican paymasters whom they regarded as even lower than Communists.
The Pakistani military acts like a classic mercenary towards his hated employer; expecting loyalty from him makes as much sense as expecting love from a prostitute.
In some respects, the worst thing that could happen to both China and Pakistan is for them to have an even closer alliance than they do now. They deserve each other, for neither side understands the other at all. Pakistan acts out of desperation and spite, whereas China acts out of imperiousness and a thirst for power. Once they fall out with one another, and that will happen given time, it’s time to bring out the popcorn.
(Barbra Streisand) Judy: Love means never having to say you’re sorry.
(Ryan O’Neill) Howard: That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.
- What’s Up Doc?
RagnarD,
Thank you (extravagant bow) I feel touched.
Alexis @ #21 . . .
“In some respects, the worst thing that could happen to both China and Pakistan is for them to have an even closer alliance than they do now. They deserve each other, for neither side understands the other at all. Pakistan acts out of desperation and spite, whereas China acts out of imperiousness and a thirst for power. Once they fall out with one another, and that will happen given time, it’s time to bring out the popcorn.”
My thoughts too. I can’t think of any two societies that are more different than China and Pakistan. On the other hand, China and the United States seem well suited for each other, as do Russia and the United States.
I’ve often thought that the U.S. should just offer to divide the oil in the Middle East with China, and be done with this foolish rivalry. Pakistan will definitely not benefit from Chinese influence. Neither will Libya or the rest of Africa, for that matter. The Chinese will CRUSH Islam when the time comes. Surely the Pakistanis must have some glimmer of the Chinese nature. One doesn’t have to be an “expert” on China to understand the point of view of the Chinese. Just talk to some of them. A no brainer.
I’ve attained an age where my hormones have quieted, and my libido has withered. I’m back to where I was before it arose. All I can say is, thank God! It is liberating. Also, quite disturbing. You mean all that pain, angst, profound longing, the rare sublime moments, the sometimes raw howl of the wind in chasm of Being, all that could be chalked down to hormone output?
I’d like to find that box office, to the Theatre of the Absurd that we call Romance, that I nervously entered so many years ago, so I can demand my money back.
But, in the end, perhaps this compensation is enough: I’m now free of it. At last. Hip, hip, horay!
Listen friends, and mark my words in this moment and this hour–
God is jealous for his name for his name is jealous.
Nor is this a charming flower to set before a man
nor one of his commands.
Yet, without Jesus, this is more than we can love as we desire peace,
and less than we can know as we desire joy.
For the sacred fire
that makes us liars–
I mean, that separates speech from dreams,
and separates our flesh from the future–
is God’s power manifested.
So, in the year and the hour– for his sake, invest your desire in Jesus.
Follow his holy fire for right now. Right now he intercedes for us in heaven!
Some will say we are people of the way.
We are people of the way.
We praise his holy name
Yahweh.
I am who I am.
I cause things to be.
I am the first cause of creation.
We praise his holy name
Elohym.
And say “Thank you Jesus for your precious blood–
better, so much better than the blood of Abel.
How then should we pray?
I pray bless me a lot Adonai.
Show me your kingdom and righteousness
in such a way that my thoughts words and deeds
reflect your wisdom and power–
and that– for the sake of your honor and glory.
So that I will live in your presence
in this life and the next.
For your name sake
Let me hear my children praise your name
And their children too.
I pray all this in Jesus name.
There is a sucker born every minute. Why couldn’t the NZ man find love in his own country? Surely there are sufficient number of lonely and/or desperate women in NZ as in every country on earth. 600,000 NZD could have gone a long way in his search for love.
Dante believed that loneliness was the memory of happy times lost. And for perhaps that reason, the demand for love will always be greatest among those who have only heard rumor of it and glimpsed it, fleetingly, but once.
——————————————————————————–
Simply, perfectly true.
To understand the behaviour of Pakistan, one word suffices and that is India. Pakistan suffers from a damnable hatred of all things Indian in particular of the Hindus. How dare the kaffirs succeed? Just as beings abandoned to their lusts and hatred in a story from the Bible or Dante, substantial numbers of Pakistanis are caught in the whirlpool of their own sins. The Chinese have taken advantage of the blood fued of between Pakistan and India to triangulate against India. They think they being very smart, but no has put them to the test yet and we Indians have different ideas. Another generation of Indians may just conclude that it is not desirable that Tibet continues to suffer under the Chinese heel.
You mean all that pain, angst, profound longing, the rare sublime moments, the sometimes raw howl of the wind in chasm of Being, all that could be chalked down to hormone output?
Baseball has the same effects even after the hormones quiet down.
I thik there are some kinds of Romance that grow stronger over the years, or perhaps for want of a better word, recover themselves. Sentiment is the province of children and the elderly. The Velveteen Rabbit and the faded old photo coe from the same part of the heart. When my grandfather died, at 98, he asked us to turn off the airconditioning in the hospital room and to open the windows.
“I want,” he said, “to see the sun.” And we stood around him and recited, not the arguments from his adulthood but the prayers of his youth. My grandmother died a couple of months afterward. There was nothing wrong with her, but in the weeks after grandpa died there was nothing on her mind but the thought she wanted to follow him on, until she did. They say that young love is strong, but the only people I have ever seen truly die of a broken heart are the old.
My favorite chapter in the Brothers Karamazo is Ilusha’s Stone. It is one of the most emotionally charged passages in all of literature, seen through the eyes of parents and children and a young man who can see with the eyes of both age and childhood: Alyosha. At the famous speech at the stone Alyosha charges both the young and the old to be true to memory. The memory that was and the memory to come.
“Boys, I should like to say one word to you, here at this place.”
The boys stood round him and at once bent attentive and expectant eyes upon him.
“Boys, we shall soon part. I shall be for some time with my two brothers, of whom one is going to Siberia and the other is lying at death’s door. But soon I shall leave this town, perhaps for a long time, so we shall part. Let us make a compact here, at Ilusha’s stone, that we will never forget Ilusha and one another.
And whatever happens to us later in life, if we don’t meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones, do you remember, by the bridge? and afterwards we all grew so fond of him. He was a fine boy, a kindhearted, brave boy, he felt for his father’s honour and resented the cruel insult to him and stood up for him. And so in the first place, we will remember him, boys, all our lives. And even if we are occupied with most important things, if we attain to honour or fall into great misfortune — still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are. My little doves let me call you so, for you are very like them, those pretty blue birds, at this minute as I look at your good dear faces. My dear children, perhaps you won’t understand what I am saying to you, because I often speak very unintelligibly, but you’ll remember all the same and will agree with my words some time. You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us. Perhaps we may even grow wicked later on, may be unable to refrain from a bad action, may laugh at men’s tears and at those people who say as Kolya did just now, ‘I want to suffer for all men,’ and may even jeer spitefully at such people. But however bad we may become — which God forbid — yet, when we recall how we buried Ilusha, how we loved him in his last days, and how we have been talking like friends all together, at this stone, the cruellest and most mocking of us — if we do become so will not dare to laugh inwardly at having been kind and good at this moment! What’s more, perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great evil and he will reflect and say, ‘Yes, I was good and brave and honest then!’ Let him laugh to himself, that’s no matter, a man often laughs at what’s good and kind. That’s only from thoughtlessness. But I assure you, boys, that as he laughs he will say at once in his heart, ‘No, I do wrong to laugh, for that’s not a thing to laugh at.’
And I would do wrong to laugh at those yearn fruitlessly for love; who circle the globe looking for their Sailor From Gibraltar, or go through clip joints looking for Velma. “And we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
Talk aboutcher jolting departure from the grand issues of the day.
Worlds quake, nations teeter on the brink of dissolution, currencies wither, whole cities depopulate in relentless slow motion, industries pop out of existence like cherry pits spat out by idle munching titans, and I’m not feeling so good myself today.
And Wretchard notes with alarm the continuing capacity for delusion among the lonely hearts.
Well, my brother comments that love is a very strange thing, and possibly in Wretchard’s experience the mingling of Catholic, Muslim, and various tribal traditions (of the Philippines, that is) may be remarkably more complex and treacherous than what we deal with in the U.S.
For my part, I find that U.S. sexual/social expectations are monumentally screwed up. Most of the women I’ve dated since I turned 40 expect to have casual sex by the second date or conclude the man is a pathetic loser. Sexual roles have been turned on their heads, compared to the norm of my youth. Meanwhile, the incidence of STDs among pre-teens is a tidal wave threatening to swamp the culture, and for the last decade parents have been learning with great dismay that their innocent little darlings have learned to use blow jobs as a form of greeting to achieve and maintain any discernible appeal to the contrary sex.
Sexuality without limits seems to have created at least as much loneliness, misery and self-loathing as did the constraints, shaming, scorn and alleged hypocrisy of the time before “The Pill.”
Wretchard says: And I would do wrong to laugh at those yearn fruitlessly for love; who circle the globe looking for their Sailor From Gibraltar, or go through clip joints looking for Velma.
Interesting that Wretchard references a passage from The Brothers Karamazov that is basically about friendship and familial affection rather than romantic love. I sometimes wonder how many people feel needlessly lonely in the contemporary world because they have been told implicitly (by advertising as well as popular novels and magazines) that erotic love is the only kind that “really” counts and that to lack a romantic or sexual partner is to somehow fail as a human being. Our ancestors were wiser in this matter, acknowledging that friendship can be as powerful a bond and as worthy a school for character as sexual mating. I find myself thinking of Book IV, chapter 9, in Augustine’s Confessions, in which the bishop looks back on his youth, including his passionate grief for a close friend who died too soon. After recounting the intensity of his mourning for his friend, Augustine concludes that no love is ever truly lost if one is but mindful of its ultimate source: “Blessed is he who loves thee, and who loves his friend in thee, and his enemy also, for thy sake; for he alone loses none dear to him, if all are dear in Him who cannot be lost. And who is this but our God: the God that created heaven and earth, and filled them because he created them by filling them up?”
I like to think that BC is in its own quiet way shaping a community of friends.
The swindled Kiwis were yearning for love to give meaning to their lives. Better that than using hate to give one’s life meaning.
Osama Bin Laden?
Re: Ajax comment editor.
I have noticed that after submitting a comment, if I copy my submitted comment to the clipboard, then click ‘edit’ I get the usual blank edit box into which I can paste the copied comment. I can then edit that comment in the Ajax edit box. However, when I click ‘save’ to re-submit the edited comment, nothing happens.
Thank you, PA Cat. You remind us again of the miraculous nature of this place, where we can share thoughts and mull over ideas that force us repeatedly to re-examine fundamental assumptions.
I’m just finishing several years of full time teaching at a faith-based university. As my contract is not being renewed, I’m reflecting on both the circumstances that had made me ready to accept the appointment, and how the experience has affected me. Most importantly it’s helped me see more clearly how to integrate my own faith into my everyday activities. I’m no academic, so the prospect of continuing there indefinitely was never certain, nor was it my ultimate goal to spend the rest of my career teaching rather than actually designing and producing animation.
Throughout these years of 60-hour weeks (seemingly common among the full time faculty) the community Wretchard has cultivated and nurtured has helped keep me sane, reminding me that there are vast currents and titanic forces at work in the great wide world to which we must attend. They beggar the puny bickerings of faculty senate governance committee proceedings, budget shocks, grading, the parade of interim deans, replacement deans, demoted deans, and assistant deans jockeying for advancement. And – oh, yeah – the hapless students wondering if their majors will still exist by the time they reach their culminating semester…
Wow. I know there are times I’ve just used this forum to vent — petty self-indulgence, saying gratuitously mean things about a hapless mediocrity who likely can’t wrap his head around the nasty business he’s gotten into since Señor Soros and company began grooming him.
But much of the comment here repeatedly reminds us (and me) that we must translate the outrage to action, engaging with other citizens to challenge them to THINK about what is unfolding, and preparing our selves and families as we should for any foreseeable cataclysm. Lay in appropriate supplies, learn skills, build networks with people you can trust, and all the while act responsibly to counter the trends that seem to be leading us relentlessly toward catastrophe. They are, after all, acts of men, not forces of nature.
And the hearts of men and women can be changed, sometimes by acts of selfless courage and love as effectively as by violence or anger.
So often, we can see the solutions. What is needed is the will.
#27 Ivan said: “Why couldn’t the NZ man find love in his own country? Surely there are sufficient number of lonely and/or desperate women in NZ as in every country on earth.”
For sure but they don’t make good partners anymore than he would. You can’t offer what you don’t have. Two desperate people are a divorce waiting to happen.
If Marx had bathed more and spent less time slicing boils of his butt with his straight razor and had gotten laid more, would the world be different. If Tiberius hadn’t loved the wife he was forced to divorce. If I may steal from Tom Kratman,”Aries is ever Eros’s bitch.”
I believe it was Ambrose Bierce in the Devil’s Dictionary who wrote:
“Second Marriages: The Triumph of Hope over Experience.”
I waited until early thirties to marry after a tempestuous fling with dope in my twenties. We met at church, two refugees from bad faith in sex,drugs and rock n’ roll, and found enduring love, now 30 years and stronger than ever. There is love to be found, just not likely with sweaty palms on a key board. Folks just need to get out more.
“… If to conquer love, has tried,
To conquer grief, tries more, as all things prove,
For grief indeed is love and grief beside… ”
____Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Kudos to W. and to Walt, as always.
Interesting how many of the themes of the post—from the first love, and the Velma-type search, to Dante and other classic literature—are reflected in Dylan’s “Tangled up in Blue,” which according to his web site he first sang in public on Nov 13, 1975 and last sang on Nov 27, 2010, for a total of 1094 performances. (It has one of my all-time favorite song rhymes, “employed”/”Delacroix,” with “spell”/”ax just fell” right up there too.)
Tangled Up In Blue
Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’
I was layin’ in bed
Wond’rin’ if she’d changed at all
If her hair was still red
Her folks they said our lives together
Sure was gonna be rough
They never did like Mama’s homemade dress
Papa’s bankbook wasn’t big enough
And I was standin’ on the side of the road
Rain fallin’ on my shoes
Heading out for the East Coast
Lord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through
Tangled up in blue
She was married when we first met
Soon to be divorced
I helped her out of a jam, I guess
But I used a little too much force
We drove that car as far as we could
Abandoned it out West
Split up on a dark sad night
Both agreeing it was best
She turned around to look at me
As I was walkin’ away
I heard her say over my shoulder
“We’ll meet again someday on the avenue”
Tangled up in blue
I had a job in the great north woods
Working as a cook for a spell
But I never did like it all that much
And one day the ax just fell
So I drifted down to New Orleans
Where I happened to be employed
Workin’ for a while on a fishin’ boat
Right outside of Delacroix
But all the while I was alone
The past was close behind
I seen a lot of women
But she never escaped my mind, and I just grew
Tangled up in blue
She was workin’ in a topless place
And I stopped in for a beer
I just kept lookin’ at the side of her face
In the spotlight so clear
And later on as the crowd thinned out
I’s just about to do the same
She was standing there in back of my chair
Said to me, “Don’t I know your name?”
I muttered somethin’ underneath my breath
She studied the lines on my face
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe
Tangled up in blue
She lit a burner on the stove
And offered me a pipe
“I thought you’d never say hello,” she said
“You look like the silent type”
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin’ coal
Pourin’ off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue
I lived with them on Montague Street
In a basement down the stairs
There was music in the cafés at night
And revolution in the air
Then he started into dealing with slaves
And something inside of him died
She had to sell everything she owned
And froze up inside
And when finally the bottom fell out
I became withdrawn
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on like a bird that flew
Tangled up in blue
So now I’m goin’ back again
I got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know
They’re an illusion to me now
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenters’ wives
Don’t know how it all got started
I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives
But me, I’m still on the road
Headin’ for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in blue
Copyright © 1974 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2002 by Ram’s Horn Music
As long as love remains a known unknown, there is hope for the future. When love is “…that which you know, but isn’t so…” trials and tribulations await.
WWS/39—no, it was Samuel Johnson that said it.
“Two clients were promised nights out with Penthouse Pets.”
10. allen:
Make of it what you will.
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
11. marymcl
@10 allen: That’s a great example of what Thomas Sowell was talking about when he called Marx a brilliant propagandist. It’s a lovely, lyrical expression of an meaningless statement.
* * * *
Maybe Marx on commodification might be more appropriate than Marx on religion. Love has been commodified to a great extent in contemporary capitalist culture and largely collapsed into equivalence with sex. This is not to say that people don’t still seek love. But love is a difficult thing to commoditize, while sex is easy to commoditize. The internet can be accommodate an economy of love and relationships; but it more easily accommodates an economy of sex.
Marx was a humanist romantic, and his critique of commodification is a profound one. Without religion, however, it opens the door to even greater exploitation of human beings via socialism than is performed via capitalist commodification. Catholic social doctrine/subsidiarist thought results in some kind of balance of social critique and respect for human beings.
Here’s a Wikipedia entry on Marx on commodification:
” Marxist political economy,[3] commodification takes place when economic value is assigned to something not previously considered in economic terms; for example, an idea, identity or gender. So commodification refers to the expansion of market trade to previously non-market areas, and to the treatment of things as if they were a tradable commodity.
“For instance, sex becomes a marketed commodity, something to be bought and sold rather than freely given. Human beings can be considered subject to commodification in contexts such as genetic engineering, social engineering, cloning, eugenics, social Darwinism, Fascism, mass marketing and employment. An extreme case of commodification is slavery, where human beings themselves become a commodity to be sold and bought. Similarly, the use of non-human animals for food, clothing, entertainment, or testing represents the commodification of other living beings.
“’While a person dies every day during the eight or more hours in which he or she functions as a commodity, individuals come to life afterward in their spiritual creations. But this remedy bears the germs of the same sickness: that of a solitary being seeking harmony with the world.’” — Che Guevara [4]
“Karl Marx extensively criticized the social impact of commodification under the name commodity fetishism and alienation.
“Commodification is often criticised on the grounds that some things ought not to be for sale and ought not to be treated as if they were a tradeable commodity.”
Actually, “Love Sick” might be more appropriate for this thread:
I’m walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping
Did I hear someone tell a lie?
Did I hear someone’s distant cry?
I spoke like a child; you destroyed me with a smile
While I was sleeping
I’m sick of love but I’m in the thick of it
This kind of love I’m so sick of it
I see, I see lovers in the meadow
I see, I see silhouettes in the window
I watch them ’til they’re gone and they leave me hanging on
To a shadow
I’m sick of love; I hear the clock tick
This kind of love; I’m love sick
Sometimes the silence can be like the thunder
Sometimes I feel like I’m being plowed under
Could you ever be true? I think of you
And I wonder
I’m sick of love; I wish I’d never met you
I’m sick of love; I’m trying to forget you
Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to be with you
Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music
“The perception of beauty is a moral test.”
I was lovesick for several years in my early twenties. Which lasts about an eternity. Her name was Stacia. Maybe she represented a doorway that if I could pass through it, I might really live, no longer looking in from the outside. She wasn’t domestic, though, she was wild and free, a defiant spirit against a painful life. Think Forest Gump and Jenny, if you need to laugh. I tried hard to forget her. Then our schedules would overlap, and the sound of her voice from another room would reach me and all the thoughts I’d carefully organized over many days of effort would be wiped away. In the end I decided to just be grateful that I could feel that deeply, which I got blindsided with. And she was decent to me, in the end. She could have had whatever she wanted from me, and destroyed me.
I don’t think back on that time too often, anymore. Good things have come my way.
Unless a man already has his Velma, if he isn’t looking for her, at least longing for her, at least longing for her in his best moments, he’s dead.
“You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home;” –or of first love, the first lost love that had power.
In dreams she spoke to others
she never spoke to me.
She never spoke
she turned away.
One dream only
one dream in all those years.
She kissed me,
her lips a hot pearl.
One dream,
in all those years.
“But however bad we may become — which God forbid — yet, when we recall how we buried Ilusha, how we loved him in his last days, and how we have been talking like friends all together, at this stone, the cruellest and most mocking of us — if we do become so will not dare to laugh inwardly at having been kind and good at this moment! What’s more, perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great evil and he will reflect and say, ‘Yes, I was good and brave and honest then!’”
–”And I would do wrong to laugh at those yearn fruitlessly for love; who circle the globe looking for their Sailor From Gibraltar, or go through clip joints looking for Velma…”
I think your assessment is spot on. I divorced a couple of years back after almost 20 years of marriage. I was in love; she wasn’t – right from the start. I found out from her pre-marriage roommate that she had confessed she didn’t love me right before the marriage, but married me anyway. And the marriage was awful (of course, it was my fault for not being able to make her love me.)
But a big part of me wanted to find a way to go back and do it over again, only this time do it right. The reality is that you have to get past that if you ever want to find happiness. I noticed that when I finally started dating again, I was picking out women who had some of the hang-ups my exwife had. So there was something in me that needed to change before I got involved seriously with anyone again.
These guys need to study Game.
http://www.bangpickupguide.com/
Sending even one cent before you’ve established attraction is a major Game crime.
@45 Aardvark
The “commodification” of sex is also known as the world’s oldest profession. That may not suit Marx’s point, or yours, but there it is. I’m admittedly boxing over my weight here, but it strikes me as ridiculous to conflate employment with fascism and eugenics. Possibly Marx “commodified” everything because that’s what suited his theoretical framework. But however elegant his thinking, (and I’ll have to take your word for it) it was fatally divorced from reality, as evidenced by the results whenever and wherever his ideas were put into practice. (btw Che’s statement about work is just as pointless as Marx’s dismissal of religion, and so much the worse for lacking Marx’s skill as a writer.)
Thanks wretchard and all for a thoughtful thread with a little bit of everything – heartache, happiness, cynicism, humor, hope. Sex is a force of nature, and love is a great mystery.
“Sailor from Gibraltar” reminded me of my cousin, Tamquette, who slept her way through swaths of the testosterone brigade and at 40 found her true love was a sailor from Perth. She followed him there and married, and at 42 produced a beautiful baby daughter, none more astonished than she. I have not seen nor heard from her in over 20 years. Grant she be well, LORD, till we meet again.
Trust is what we need to seek.
Companion to travel life’s road
and know your back is covered.
We never ask at marriage ceremony:
Do you trust this one?
Yet it’s the most important question.
We’d never start a business
with one we didn’t trust.
Yet marry thinking love suffices.
So trust not love
tis marriage secret
to live a life of joy.
This year marks the 40th year my wife has put up with me and my dangerous republican presbyterian baseball addictions. We are opposites, to cover each other’s backs, or at least we try.
I’m past my biblical allotted three score and ten, and, although I’m not the randy teenager I once (for about 50 years) was, I still want/desire/enjoy loving and being loved.
I guess I’m not dead yet.
And what about loving God?
Only if you are the same man at 60 that you were at 20.
She could have had whatever she wanted from me, and destroyed me.
Love is very dangerous. It requires more trust than most are willing to give. To bare your secrets. To bare your soul. To admit your price.
You see the results all too often – “(s)he treated me like dirt and I was happy to accept it.”
The net? Most folks are looking for advantage. Which puts the folks in love at a serious disadvantage. Gibran had the answer “love anyway – pay the price”.
Or that old guy: ’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’.