Fumes and Visions

[Terrance Flaherty]

David Morris wrote:

 I don't know why Dixon's "fidelity" to Mason has to be maintained for
this
> reading to be valid).


Even the Duck wants fidelity. It's a no load and it beat the S&P and the
WSJ dart board. 
Romantic? 

According to the historian Denis de Rougemont, there is
an "inescapable conflict in the west between passion and marriage". 
Our civilization must recognize, he urges, "that marriage, 
upon which its social structure stands, is more serious than the love
which cultivates, and that marriage cannot be founded on a fine
ardor." 

The issue, for de Rougemont, is the danger of passion: we adore
passion, and we are fascinated by it. According to de Rougemont, we
even have a perverse desire to achieve unhappiness, to attain tragic
proportions: "Western man is drawn to what destroys 'the happiness
of the married couple' at least as much as to anything that ensures it.
Where does this contradiction come from? If the breakdown of
marriage has been simply due to the attractiveness of the forbidden, it
still remains to be seen why we hanker after unhappiness, and what
notion of love - what secret of our existence, of the human mind,
perhaps of our history - this hankering must hint at." 


http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/scienceandnature/story/0,6000,493358,00.html