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"dance in your dreams, it'll be like old times..."
February 2, 2006
A cup of unbelievably good tea, just like Babushka used to make it. My brother home for a night, chillin with rap playing softly in the next room. The next couple pages of a new book: Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving. An insightful book, and also inspiring -- not necessarily in the increasing-optimism sense, but in a thought-provoking way.
Our whole idea of culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man's happiness consits in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way...
The sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.
Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the market orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same patterns of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.
If raised a different culture, how would we love differently? In cultures not driven by the power of purchase, how do people love?
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