File spoon-archives/french-feminism.archive/french-feminism_1997/97-02-05.141, message 154


From: Wynship West Hillier <wynship-AT-leland.stanford.edu>
Subject: love
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 1996 09:54:41 -0800 (PST)


Hi all,
	I'm new to this list.  I just wanted to share the following passage
on love from the beginning of Kristeva's novel, _The Samurai_.  It makes me
think of the times I've been in love (sigh...)!

----

	There are no love stories anymore.  And yet women want them, and so do
men when they're not ashamed of being tender and sad like women.  But men are
all in a hurry to make money, and to die.  They beget children in order to
survive, or else when they foget and talk to themselves as if they weren't
talking to themselves, in the midst of pleasure or its absence.  They're always
taking planes, high-speed metros, high-speed trains, space shuttles.  They
don't have time to look at that pink acacia stretching out its branches toward
the clouds and the strips of sunlit blue silk in between; the pink acacia with
its tiny quivering leaves and the light fragrance that bees turn into honey
	...
	Love, while it lasts, reaches right down into our predilictions until
all of our five senses submerge us in pain or delight.  Love is said to last
when the adventurers involved manage to bind up their wounds, when the skin
heals, and they start to look at each other again like Narcissus contemplating
himself in the water.  It calls for a lot of patience and a great respect for
time.  Where love's concerned, you have to take good care of time.
	Not time in the sense of duration--that's just a spin-off from the art
of loving--but time in the sense of the magic that transforms a moment of 
perception, disquiet, or happiness into a gift.  The gift of a word, a gesture,
a look.  Just a little sound to show you I'm taking you with me, that we like
being here together under the acacia and the pine, in this whirl of flowers,
waves, quartets, migrane and backache.  That's how the sensation of time is
born.  And once given, these perceptible moments join up into minute acts.
Though they come out of the void, they join together and bear us up.  So it's
obvious that time can't exist without love.  Time is the love of little things,
of dreams, of desires.  You don't have time because you don't have enough love.
You waste your time when you don't love.  You forget times past when you don't
have anything to say to anyone.  Or else you're the prisoner of a false time
that doesn't pass.
	-- Julia Kristeva, _The Samurai_, pp. 2-3.

********************************************************************************
Wynship West Hillier
Blackwelder 9D
Escondido Village
Stanford  CA 94305
(415) 497-6104 (fax & tad)
wynship-AT-Stanford.edu

"The poison of weaker natures strengthens the strong, nor do they
 call it poison."  - Nietzsche, _The_Gay_Science_
********************************************************************************


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