Wanting to write something about today but, well, considering how foul my mood is, better to use someone else’s words.
It occurred to me this morning that our concept of love might be struggling to go back around to the historical mean — and not the sensible part of the historical mean — but the easier, and less civilized part.
Look, our entire concept of romantic love as shaping and creating your entire life was partly a construct of the same wonderful Rousseaunian philosophy of the “natural man”. If you’ve ever read Tess D’Ubervilles, not to mention suffered through Effie Briest in German with a slightly deranged teacher, you are aware that the “natural” philosophers of the 18th century more or less invented the concept that you should abandon everything for love and reshape your whole life around it. Also, that there was only one true love, and you couldn’t really have another.
I’m not a hundred percent sure who came up with the idea of soul mates, because mostly…
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