[b]John Fowles, The Magus
Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.[/b]
My guess: Not just ours.
He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
Five will get you ten he was a Kid. Either that or Mitford.
Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.
That and the military industrial complex.
We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out. But whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know. But pity yourself for what it did.
This is a good point, right? Besides, there’s always pornography.
The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?
Unless of course there are no other options.
There is no plan. All is hazard.
Not counting all the actual plans that there are.