Gift from the Sea


Gift from the Sea
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Vintage Books Edition


We all wish to be loved alone. “Don´t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me”, runs the old popular song. Perhaps, as Auden says in his poem, this is a fundamental error in mankind.

For the error bred in bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

It is such a sin? In discussing this verse with an Indian philosopher, I had an illuminating answer. “It is alright to wish to be loved alone” he said, mutuality is the essence of love. There cannot be others in mutuality. It is only in the time-sense that it is wrong. It is when we desire continuity of being loved alone that we go wrong. For not only do we insist on believing romantically in the “one-and-only” – the one-and-only love, the one-and-only mate, the one-and-only mother, the one-and-only security – we wish the one-and-only to be permanent, ever present and continuous. The desire for continuity of being-loved-alone seems to me “the error bred in bone”. For “there is no one-and-only”, as a friend of mine said in a similar discussion, “there are just one-and-only moments.”

Comentários

Postagens mais visitadas deste blog

O Importante é a Rosa

A Flauta Mágica

Alice (não me escreva aquela carta de amor)