Status Updates From Alles over liefde

hoe meer ik erin lees, hoe beter het wordt.

This is starting to be a diatribe on how we're all getting away from caring relationships and moving toward instant sexual gratification. This was published in 2011. I think we're getting away from the sensual and moving more toward the non-sensual. Eating at a restaurant recently, I observed that over 80% of the people have their noses in a mobile device, even at tables with other people! Are they watching porn?

Not sure about this. In a way, it's blaming women, again.
"The rise of violence against women and the rise and rise of porn, the total and addictive power of the click that can delete and make manifest in rapid succession, are perhaps in part a destructive response to the waning of female complicity in assuring men of their dominance."

Love, sex and religion? Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". I'm having too much fun this morning.
https://youtu.be/YrLk4vdY28Q

Music to accompany this reading. This is such a fun book to read for us who love philosophy and literature.

https://youtu.be/4uu37uv3drw

"You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination."

"If you wanted to be in love–and I wanted nothing else–then you had to welcome into your soul love’s symptoms and concomitants: fear of betrayal which was no less potent than the fear of death, jealousy which ate into the very marrow of your bones, a feverish anticipation of loss which no amount of trust would ever assuage. Loss–loss waited upon gain as sure as day followed night… You loved to lose..."

"Imagination nurtures the process. In love, we are all poets, for good or ill. We are also akin to psychotics. Psychosis is, after all, that aberrant condition of the mind or psyche in which contact with reality is lost and a delusional state prevails."

"Clio, like so many others, cannot in retrospect picture the face of the beloved, not even in that crucial moment when the thunderbolt struck. Proust, that acute and agonized observer of human foibles, remarks on this common enough phenomenon. His adolescent namesake hero is infatuated with Gilberte, whom he meets regularly in the tree-lined parklands of the Champs Élysées. Yet the actual face of his first love,"

"Love conferred meaning, filled life with significance. If it entailed suffering, had a dark side, it was also a school in sensibility: without it we would never know the sublime heights and perfidious lows of others–or ourselves."