Wednesday, June 13, 2012

To Clear the Tension in My Atmosphere, Part 2

Let us come back to our friend, the hairy guy who acts as a flimsy connecting thread in this little story, Mr. Jorn Barger.

Barger, creator of the term "weblog" and one of the earliest bloggers, as we have seen, maintained a website loaded with material on James Joyce, artificial intelligence, and more. Among his many impressive and worthwhile assemblages of material is a massive collection of quotes about Love gathered from the words of poets, writers, philosophers, musicians, royal figures, and others throughout the history of man.

The collection is entitled Solace: a textbook of romantic psychology and it is organized according to the stages love usually unfolds in, from "Seeking" and "Courting" down to "Trying" and "Fading" until either the love has dried up or one of the lovers passes away.

Having gone through the experience of a long-term relationship suddenly coming to an end, I've found that this collection does indeed provide "Solace" for the reader. As the "textbook of romantic psychology" states in its opening:
For this will cure him that is sick, and raise him that is in dumps; one that has loved, it will remember of it; one that has not, it will instruct...
And so I would like to now, for one last bit of blogspace, gather some quotes from Barger's very useful textbook about the experience of love's fading. This blog was, after all, originally begun out of the insistence of my ex-girlfriend who always acted as a supporter and muse for all of my writing. I feel I must give our relationship a proper sendoff before my heart paves a new road.



In hearts there linger yet 
Ashes of roses.
Elaine Goodale Eastman (xx 1863- )


When threads get tangled, you can set it free again, yet...
People tangled together. It's not so easy to untangle that.
Not so easy to untangle. Loves enmeshed...
from the Tauezo_shi


The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
W.S. Maugham "The Summing Up"


To say that you can love one person all your life is just like saying that one candle will continue burning as long as you live.
-Tolstoy "Kreutzer Sonata"


The history of a love affair is the drama of its fight against time.
            Paul Geraldy "L'Amour"


The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.
            Benjamin Disraeli



Come moth, come shadow, the world is dead;
Alas, my loved one is gone...
Walter de la Mare (xx 1873-1956) "Alone"


When you fall out of love you don't actually cry. You only cry when someone has fallen out of love with you.
Carla Lane


I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.
Edna St. Vincent Millay  "Ebb" (1921)


I have lost a world itselfe:
My earthly heaven, adieu!
Since she, alas! hath left me...
George Wither (169) "A Love Sonnet" (1618)




The ending always comes at last
Endings always come too fast
Jimmy Webb


She hath left me here all alone,
All alone, as unknown,
Who sometimes did me lead with herself,
And me loved as her own.
Sir Walter Raleigh (England 1552-1618) "As You Came from the Holy Land" (before 1600)



Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone?
 Joni Mitchell "Big Yellow Taxi"



And I would have, now love is over,
An end to all, an end.
I cannot, having been your lover,
Stoop to become your friend!
Arthur Symons "After Love"



...all the air was quick
With my last words that seemed to leap and quiver;
And in my heart I heard the little click
Of a door that closes-- quietly, forever.
Eunice Tietjens "Parting after a Quarrel"


When love turns away now, I don't follow it. I sit and suffer, unprotesting, until I feel the tread of another step.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner (xx b.1908) "Teacher" (1963)



...the experience of love is usually, like a dream, forgotten.
Murdoch (Black Prince 211)



The higher the flame has leaped, the colder and deader the ashes.
Olive Schreiner (xx 1855?-1920) "From Man to Man"


1 comment:

  1. PQ, you are a great antidote to all cynicism. Live and be well.

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