Simone Weil 爱
"Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discover that through a bodily appearance we have loved an imaginary being? It is much more terrible than death, for death does not prevent the beloved from having lived. That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination.
It is an act of cowardice to seek from (or wish to give) the people we love any other consolation than that which works of art give us, which help us through the mere fact that they exist. To love and to be loved only serve mutually to render this existence more concrete, more constantly present to the mind. But it should be present as the source of our thoughts not as their object. If there are grounds for wishing to be understood, it is not for ourselves but for the other, in order that we may exist for him.
Everything which is vile or second-rate in us revolts against purity and needs, in order to save its own life, to soil this purity. To soil is to modify, it is to touch. The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil.
To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love."
— Simone Weil, on love
It is an act of cowardice to seek from (or wish to give) the people we love any other consolation than that which works of art give us, which help us through the mere fact that they exist. To love and to be loved only serve mutually to render this existence more concrete, more constantly present to the mind. But it should be present as the source of our thoughts not as their object. If there are grounds for wishing to be understood, it is not for ourselves but for the other, in order that we may exist for him.
Everything which is vile or second-rate in us revolts against purity and needs, in order to save its own life, to soil this purity. To soil is to modify, it is to touch. The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil.
To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love."
— Simone Weil, on love
