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"...there was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person loved: and therefore it was well said, 'That it is impossible to love and to be wise.'"
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"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man. " |
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Through our hunger, thirst and lust we reach out to others to satisfy ourselves. Through the aesthetic we come to know outwardly the world, its creatures, and the shadows of their inward being. Through shared experience we come to know the inward creature we perceive outwardly. Through experience and contemplation we come to know ourselves. In the knowledge of ourselves, of others, and of the world, we learn to reach out to others to satisfy not ourselves alone but those around us: as it is written: it is more blessed to give than to receive. |
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"Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set: and surely virtue is best in a body that is comely, though not of delicate features; and that hath rather dignity of presence, than beauty of aspect." |
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"But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love." |
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No two people are equals. Each has strengths and weaknesses.
Everyone has and expresses will. Two or more together determine what they do and how they do it through interplay of wills.
The two-tone caricature of dominance and submission fails to capture the myriad shades, the expanse of colour, the sensory and contemplative delights and torments of a life lived fully.
Whilst the extremes of sensation lure and delight, they cannot in themselves sustain relations between friends. Two people joined interact, give and take, negotiate a dynamic and live in a tenuous unity on its mutable, malleable basis.
Two people aware can approach such a union as they are, free from pretense, willing to share not merely bed and board but what aspects of self emerge, the depth and breadth of which emergence determining the quality of the union. Absence of pretense, that is, a grasp and presentation of true self, is vital to such a union, which, if fortune smiles, enhances, develops and deepens that grasp through the sharing of it with the other.
We can only honestly speak of individual tendencies and qualities (such as dominance or submissiveness) in abstract terms, for these are amplified or muted in the light of those of our counterparts. It is in the interplay of our qualities with others that we grow and become. |
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