John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

There are two main sources of the desire which is called love: self-hatred and self-love. In self-hatred, one desires the opposite of oneself: the timid, outcast, sensitive woman wants a man’s man who never shows weakness; the woman who feels she has gone so deep into depravity that love is gone for her seeks a sensitive, innocent man. This sort of love is the origin of the adage that “opposites attract”: it almost invariably ends badly. The other sort of love begins with narcissism, loving oneself, cherishing oneself, idolizing oneself: from this, one loves those who are similar to oneself and one most loves those who seem to embody our own ideal mental image of ourselves. This is the foundation of assortative mating and is the real foundation of all healthy relationships: an overpowering love for self that transforms into love for another.

In short, love can either be a means to escape from oneself or to reaffirm and deify oneself — both seemingly vices, but one, the one built on vanity and narcissism, is truly one of the beautiful wonders of our world.

Reading the criticisms most intellectuals make of other intellectuals, I constantly find myself suspecting that they so often miss the point made in what they read because they are resolved to miss the point, because understanding might put them in the dangerous position where they might have to change their opinions.

Though I suspect few men would admit it or perhaps even consider it, a woman often seems most lovable when she is crying: this truly is a somewhat perverse feeling born of our profound desire to protect women.

Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.¹

Originally written as poem, reset by myself as the prose it plainly is.

1. Irving Layton : The Wholy Bloody Bird↩

When one has lost the willingness to suffer or even to risk suffering for another, one has lost the ability to love.

Eventually every place loses its novelty and hence its magic, when there is nothing left to learn or be amazed at. And only the people we love remain.

It’s remarkable: there comes a day in your life when you realize you no longer know how to function at the slow pace most people function at. And, more amazingly, you realize that you no longer are sure you would want to try because you aren’t convinced anyone operating at a slower pace would be worth slowing down for or that any experience lived at such a pace could be worth having. But always there is some person who shows up to make you question it all.

I was born in a time when the majority of people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it — without knowing why.¹

A simple summary of why I think most atheists are naive in thinking that the absence of belief in God is a major step in the intellectual progress of the human race. The problem with people is not so much what is believed, but why it is believed.

Mi sed agradece un vaso de agua, no un mar de agua.²

Beautifully simple words, serving as a simple cure for Romanticism’s incurable need for excess.

1. Fernando Pessoa : The Book Of Disquiet : A Factless Autobiography, 1↩
2. Antonia Porchia : Voces↩

Perhaps the most profound effect of feminism over the centuries will be an increase in assortative mating caused by having allowed women to choose their own mates.

Not the remembrace of days spent together, but the hope of those yet to come sustains a friendship. Where such hope has died, neither gratitude nor loyalty can compensate for its loss.