Wednesday, January 5, 2011

This just in: "Down with love..."

"well okay then." as Marika is wont to say, not in disparagement of love, per se, but in general.

An example:

Me: "I'm feeling perverse and I think the sky should be called 'chartreuse' today."
Marika: "Well okay then."
Sidebar: the sky is nowhere near the c
olor chartreuse on said day.

But I digress.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.” This indicates a few things about Dostoyevsky; that he was perhaps a dreamer, and that he had a rocky love life.



The latter was certainly true enough to have him included in
Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love, a book compiled by Andrew Shaffer. This little gem pulls together over 25 portraits of philosophers who were some of the brightest thinkers of their time, but who perhaps were a little dimmer when it came to human interaction and foibles of the heart. It is a great (anti)valentine to the logical and/ or makes a great coffee table book.

Maybe it's that like most of life, these philosophers over thought this simple concept. In any case it is interesting to see who turned their mistress into a surrogate daughter, who never received a "yes" to any of his marriage proposals, etc., etc., Is this overly
Schadenfreude, perhaps.

I'll leave you with a bit of Nietzche-n wisdom:


"Ah women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."

~ Friederich Nietzche
photo via
~Nieves

No comments: