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_ ******************************************************************************** --- from list french-feminism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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