and requited love
In a message dated 12/12/2015 6:39:33 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes: "I found the reference to Borges -- not
quite
as I thought, but close: "Borges was always in love. His feelings were
rarely if ever reciprocated, and this caused him pain throughout his life."
[from The Man in the Mirror of the Book, a life of Jorges Luis Borges by James
Woodall, p xxix]"
Well, one would need to ask Woodall which of HIS loves were requited and
which were not!
It seems to be straight from the intro, rather that the body of the text.
The subtitle, 'mirror', makes me think about Narcisso: perhaps Borges was
in love with himself! (or "his self," as Geary prefers -- "although you can
spell it "hisself"").
Woodall -- variations on a theme by Woodall:
i. Borges was always in love. His feelings were rarely if ever
reciprocated, and this caused him pain throughout his life.
ii. Borges was always in love.
Geary prefers:
iii. Borges was all-ways in love.
Can one be "allways" in love. One thing is
iv. Borges loves.
Another thing is
v. Borges loves someone.
This reminds me of Warner, whose favourite utterance
vi. Everybody loves my baby (but my baby don't love nobody but me;
therefore, I am my baby.
For surely some 'quantification', as logicians call it, may be needed to
provide the logical form of "Borges was always in love". Perhaps
quantification over time?
i. Borges was always in love. His feelings were rarely if ever
reciprocated, and this caused him pain throughout his life.
vii. [Borges's] feelings were rarely, if ever, reciprocated.
I love the "if ever": so unphilosophical. Either they were reciprocated or
not. Does Woodall mean:
viii. Borges's feelings were SOMETIMES reciprocated.
?
Or is the 'if' an Austin biscuit conditional ("If you are hungry, there
are biscuits in the cupboard"). It's not an Austin conditional, so Woodall is
uttering a tautology, analytic a priori:
ix. Borges's feeling were not reciprocated except when they were.
And, as Grice would say, it's quality that matters, never quantity (while
'relation' and 'mode' are otiose -- these being the four Kantian categories,
his reduction of Aristotle's ten ones).
i. Borges was always in love. His feelings were rarely if ever
reciprocated, and this caused him pain throughout his life.
x. And this caused him pain throughout his life.
Woodal is non-theistic, if that's the word. We know Borges disbelieved in
the after-life, but some people don't, and 'throughout his life' sounds
narrow. Perhaps the fact that he sometimes got his feelings unreciprocated is
STILL causing Borges pain!
To sum up:
i. Borges was always in love. His feelings were rarely if ever
reciprocated, and this caused him pain throughout his life.
It's up to Borges to say if he was always in love. I would think that after
some unlucky affairs (he had a girlfriend in Adrogue who betrayed him --
and the bad thing about this is that he had given her the autograph of "The
Aleph". They met in a bar and she told him,
xi. I'm selling your autograph.
Borges allegedly answered:
xii. If I were a gentleman, I would now go to the toilet and shoot myself.
i. Borges was always in love. His feelings were rarely if ever
reciprocated, and this caused him pain throughout his life.
It is up to Borges's 'objects of affection' to report if they cared to
reciprocate his feelings or not. The Greeks thought -- and the Romans followed
suit -- that the love you give is never the love you get. This posed for
them a lexical problem. Therefore, the Italians (perhaps Leopardi) uses
"Erote" for "Love" and "Anterote" for "Anti-Love", Love's little brother.
Apparently, Anterote was said to weigh less than Erote. In some statuary
famous
case, people think that the statue represents EROTE when it fact it
represents ANTEROTE, one infamous case in point being the Piccadilly Circus
statue
(Borges loved to get lost in Piccadilly Circus, saying he liked to indulge
in a 'pecadillo' or two).
i. Borges was always in love. His feelings were rarely if ever
reciprocated, and this caused him pain throughout his life.
Helm's point is, if I understand him correctly, unrequited love is the
theme of poetry -- and melodramma for that opera: nobody goes to the opera
house to see Medea enjoying a happy marriage with Giasone! -- Art is made up
of
tragedy, and you need to be a Neapolitan (or Rossini) to find humour and
laughter in the 'commedy of errors' involving love.
"Pain" the Graeco-Roman philosophers thought that, when caused by love, is
pleasurable. This irritated Plato so that he ALMOST wrote on the portal to
his Academy,
"It is better to have loved AND LOST -- than never to have loved at all."
-- but found that 'and lost' committed him to a game-theoretical theory of
Ideas and he was too much of an idealist to allow for that!
Cheers,
Speranza
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