Forster on love and friendship
Posted on | January 10, 2007 |
‘It is so easy to talk of “passing emotion,” and how to forget how vivid the emotion ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open.’
‘Was Mrs Wilcox one of those unsatisfactory people - there are many of them - who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling round them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour - flirting - and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law - no public opinion, even - punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable.’
‘…love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.’
‘If a man cannot lead up to passion, he can at all events lead down from it…’
- E M Forster, Howards End, originally published 1910
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3 Responses to “Forster on love and friendship”
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January 10th, 2007 @ 1:40 pm
cool! is this summer reading or part of a project?
also this is of the era that Whitehead was writing and makes a particular sense in the context of his mildly reductive cosmology of ‘natural philsophy’:
“We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge.”
I am getting a t-shirt made up that says ‘electrical discharge’. ha. No, but seriously the different temporalities of sustained relations vs immediate engagement is a problem for long term relationships. Like what is the inverse of flirty friends relative to a couple or whatever? Friendly f*ck buddies? But that is along an axis of sexual relations, when i think Forster is getting at something else. Like, the sexual tension between friends powers the flirtiness, so what would power the inverse between a couple? The threat of boredom (negative affects)? Or the joy of creative acts (positive affects) and the continual novelty of forever falling in love? I certainly don’t know!! lol!!!!
January 10th, 2007 @ 9:54 pm
Shouldn’t the t-shirt say ‘Opportunity for electrical discharge’? :o) I can imagine that working well on the summer festival circuit.
This is holiday reading, I guess. More like catch-ups. But love and friendship are ongoing - and my most important - projects.
January 11th, 2007 @ 5:36 pm
“But love and friendship are ongoing - and my most important - projects.”
haha! wonderful!