Existential Isolation

Queer 

by William S. Burroughs

“Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.”

― William S. Burroughs

Queer is a harrowing, darkly comic, and raw exploration of unrequited desire and existential isolation. The manuscript was deemed too explicitly homosexual for the era and languished unpublished until 1985. Acting as a vital bridge in the author's bibliography, it captures the exact moment where Burroughs begins to transition away from straightforward, gritty realism into the hallucinated, avant-garde style that would define his masterpiece, Naked Lunch. The narrative is a circular seduction set against the backdrop of a corrupt and spectral 1950s Mexico City. The novel functions as a heavily autobiographical self-portrait.

The reader follows William Lee, Burroughs's recurring literary alter ego—who is stranded in a sordid expat community while suffering from acute heroin withdrawal.Lee becomes frantically obsessed with Eugene Allerton, a detached, younger American military veteran.Lee drags Allerton from bar to bar in a painfully circular attempt at seduction.To keep Allerton anchored to him, Lee concocts an expedition in search of yage, a mythical, telepathic, mind-altering vine.

Fiction can take you to places that are completely outside of your own personal experience. This novel from the pen of William S. Burroughs does just that with its litany of addicts in the thrall of eros. It is exciting and visceral in its realism. Through the back streets and nights filled with haunting images of men with sexual drives that determine their fates. Powerful and comic yet sad -- a brilliant narrative from a literary genius.

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Education in the Art of Love

The Art of Love 

by Ovid

"If anyone among this people know not the art of loving, let him read my poem, and having read be skilled in love. By skill swift ships are sailed and rowed, by skill nimble chariots are driven: by skill love must be guided."
- The Art of Love, Book I, 1-4.




The art of love encompasses three books by Ovid. Using an elegiac verse style he expounds the varieties of amorous and erotic adventure in graceful language. Originally written for the sophisticated society of Augustan Rome, his poetry has continued to entertain and entrance readers ever since.

The first two books contain advice for the predatory male, but the third Ovid devotes to the opposite sex, to avoid, as he affects to say, any charge of partiality. The whole is in the mode of the erotic Alexandrian elegy, but leavened with Ovid's wit. The tradition appears to be rooted in Asia Minor due to the nature of the diction. While the elegy was originally primarily made of laments there were erotic elegies before Ovid. Among the Greeks Mimnermus and Theognis were considered great elegiasts.

The book is filled with stories and advice, here is a sample: 
“You ask perhaps if one should take the maid herself? Such a plan brings the greatest risk with it. In one case, fresh from bed, she’ll get busy, in another be tardy, in one case you’re a prize for her mistress, in the other herself. There’s chance in it: even if it favors the idea, my advice nevertheless is to abstain. I don’t pick my way over sharp peaks and precipices, no youth will be caught out being lead by me. Still, while she’s giving and taking messages, if her body pleases you as much as her zeal, make the lady your first priority, her companion the next: Love should never be begun with a servant.” 

Ovid gives a sympathetic insight into a society that was becoming consumed with a moral laxity. By contrast Horace provided a more moralistic tone of censure in his Satires. The work has enjoyed a continuing popularity ; Ovid's knowledge of human, particularly of feminine, nature, the brilliant picture of the social life of Rome, the studied artlessness of the comparisons he draws from animals and from pursuits such as hunting, farming, or sailing, the narratives that he cannot resist interweaving with his teaching---all these elements, together with a considerable degree of humor and irresistible wit, have combined to give the work a unique attractiveness. However the result of Ovid's sympathetic eroticism was the arousal of the disfavor of Augustus; Ovid was exiled for life to the coast of the Black Sea, and felt that his poetry was at least partially responsible for his misfortune. We are fortunate that the text has endured.

"But avoid men who profess elegance and good looks, and who arrange their hair in its proper place. What they tell you they have told a thousand women; their fancy wanders, and has no fixed abode." - The Art of Love, Book III, 433-36.

The Importance of Understanding for Love

Sense and Sensibility 
by Jane Austen

“She tried to explain the real state of the case to her sister.
"I do not attempt to deny," said she, "that I think very highly of him--that I greatly esteem, that I like him."
Marianne here burst with forth with indignation:
"Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor. Oh! worse than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment."
Elinor could not help laughing. "Excuse me," said she, "and be assured that I meant no offence to you, by speaking, in so quiet a way, of my own feelings.” 

― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility


On this day in 1811 Jane Austen's first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was published.  Austen wrote romantic novels and this is one of her best and the first with several to follow. But one may ask, what is the source of Austen's genius on the subject of love? It seems that she was able to develop a comprehensive view of the philosophies of her own time, including the rise of sensibility (Earl of Shaftesbury, Hume and Smith) and develop stories about real people who lived and loved, learned and grew through their experiences. Consider the two Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility. One may contrast Marianne Dashwood, the young, beautiful, passionate, and unreserved romantic. with her older sister Elinor, prudent, pretty, and proper, with all the restraint of feelings of which Marianne had none. Their father dead, the sisters and their mother were about to be displaced from their childhood home of Norland by their half brother John, and his wife, Fanny. John "was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed," and Fanny was even worse. He might have allowed the Dashwood sisters to remain at Norland, if only grudgingly, but she was determined to send them packing, especially once Elinor had begun a friendship with her brother Edward.

Edward had a bland personality and was practically paralyzed by shyness. While he was not particularly handsome Elinor struck up a somewhat dispassionate friendship with him. Again this was a contrast with her sister who, as the result of a chance meeting, had fallen for the dashing young, handsome and elegant Willoughby. The contrast of the sisters could not be better defined than in their choice of partners. Austen's genius extends to persuade the reader that Elinor's sense of love is truer than than the passionate sensibility of her younger sister. The romantic love of Marianne turns out to be as capable of tearing her heart apart as the Eros described in classical Greek dramas and philosophy. That this is the stuff of myth, one thinks of love at first sight, is felt by the reader, but for Austen it is not true love. It lacks a foundation and is thus unsuccessful. Grace and spirit and manners---the kinds of qualities that attracted Marianne to Willoughby---are wonderful to have, but they are no substitute for the Edward-like attributes of worth and heart and understanding.  The love that has these is more likely to hold sway in the long run.

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Eros and the Bee

The Infinite Moment: 
Poems from Ancient Greek 
translated by Sam Hamill



 Eros, playing among the roses,
didn't see the bee.
Stung, he howled,
he screamed to Aphrodite,

"I'm dying!  Mother!  I'm dying!
I was bitten by 
a snake with wings!"
And she kissed him and replied,

"It will pass.  It was only a bee,
my darling, but think
how long the suffering 
of all those who feel your sting."



The above poem by Anakreon, one of my favorites, is one included in this exceptionally beautiful collection of poems from Ancient Greece. The translator, Sam Hamill, has included poems from Sapphon, Alcaeus, Anakreon, and Paulus Silentiarius. In addition there is a selection of lyrical and love poems from several different sources ranging from Bacchykides and Likymnios to Meleager, Rufinus, and Marcus Argentarius. While the collection is small the poems invite the reader to delight in them again and again.

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Sweetness and Wit

Love's Alchemy

BY JOHN DONNE

Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I,

Say, where his centric happiness doth lie;

         I have lov'd, and got, and told,

But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,

I should not find that hidden mystery.

         Oh, 'tis imposture all!

And as no chemic yet th'elixir got,

         But glorifies his pregnant pot

         If by the way to him befall

Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,

         So, lovers dream a rich and long delight,

         But get a winter-seeming summer's night.

Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day,

Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?

         Ends love in this, that my man

Can be as happy'as I can, if he can

Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play?

         That loving wretch that swears

'Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,

         Which he in her angelic finds,

         Would swear as justly that he hears,

In that day's rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres.

         Hope not for mind in women; at their best

         Sweetness and wit, they'are but mummy, possess'd.

from: Poems of Love by John Donne. Folio Society, 1958.

Three by Murdoch

The Black Prince 

by Iris Murdoch

"I shall in telling it adopt the modern technique of narration, allowing the narrating consciousness to pass like a light along its series of present moments, aware of the past, unaware of what is to come." - Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

"The ambiguously romantic Black Prince of the title, Bradley Pearson, is an aged bachelor, whose range of somewhat histrionic emotions involves the serene Rachel Baffin, her confused daughter Julian, Rachel's novelist husband Arnold, Bradley's rival in so many ways, Bradley's dysfunctional sister Priscilla, and Bradley's prying ex-wife Christian..."
Bradley Pearson, British writer, is suffering from a writer's block. He has waited all his life to write his masterpiece. Finally, he feels, the time has come when he can leave his small time job as a revenue officer, and go away from the city din to write. However, his fellow writer friend, Arnold Baffin, Arnold's wife Rachel, daughter Julian, Pearson's ex-wife Christian, ex-brother-in-law Francis and sister Priscilla all tug at his attentions in various ways to make Pearson's escape impossible. Each character has his own version of the series of incidents in the novel. Murdoch ingeniously builds the complications of these incidents or accidents into a delightfully painful and humorous story of erotic abandon. The mind remarkably colors the incidents of the novel to project a story that fits each character best. Julian comfortably forgets the intricate details of an embarrassing romance, Rachel feels that Bradley is madly in love with her while Arnold believes that Bradley is jealous of his success.
This is one of her very best, about mad love, and it justly won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. 

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A Word Child 

by Iris Murdoch

“Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.”  ― Iris Murdoch

My favorite by by Ms. Murdoch, a great place to start, very darkly funny, also about mad love. The ‘word child’ of the title is Hilary Burde, our narrator. The book has an interesting structure, with each chapter headed by a day of the week. This sounds so simple, but the commentary and wordplay by Hilary is beguiling and rapidly becomes addictive. He has tried to establish order and routine in his life by having certain things that he always does on certain days of the week and the novel follows him as this routine is gradually upended.
Even those novelists most commonly deemed “philosophical” have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an “austere, unselfish, candid” prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something “mysterious, ambiguous, particular” about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. “If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships,” she said. “And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy.” 

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The Sea, the Sea 

by Iris Murdoch

“Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”  ― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

"The novel concerns a retired theater director who moves to the seashore in order to contemplate his life. He recalls how an adolescent love which he greatly idealized prohibited him from committing himself completely to any of the important women in his life. Coincidentally, he meets the woman again and tries to resume his love affair but she won't have him..." Some evocative prose from Iris Murdoch. As she explores the potent mixture of power, illusion, and self-delusion in retired actor, playwright, and theater director Charles Arrowby (based in part on Elias Canetti) , Murdoch narrates a series of startling events. Old love affairs revive and die again, friendships sour into attempted murder, hallucinations (or are they?) portend ominous happenings, and the drowning embrace of the sea waits restlessly in the background. An intricate portrait is drawn of a man bewitched and bewildered by his own powers of self-promotion and manipulation. Intermixed are fascinating characters including Mary Hartley Smith Fitch , Lizzie Scherer , Rosina Vamburgh , and Gilbert Opian. Murdoch is at her best with these characters and the cottage by the sea.


The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch. Viking Press.
A Word Child by Iris Murdoch. Viking Press.
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. Penguin Books.