“If we thought that the eyes of such a girl were merely two glittering sequins of mica, we should not be athirst to know her and to unite her life to ours. But we sense that what shines in those reflecting discs is not due solely to their material
composition; that it is, unknown to us, the dark shadows of ideas
that that person cherishes about the people and places she knows-the turn of race-courses, the sand of cycling tracks over which,
pedalling on past fields and woods, she would have drawn me after
her, . . . and above all that it is she, with her desires, her
sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will. I knew
that I should never possess this young cyclist if I did not possess
also what was in her eyes. And it was consequently her whole life
that filled me with desire.”

After centuries of emphasis on the “life of the mind,” the Romantics decided it was due time for the “life of the loins” to be given respect. Ok, ok, so they wanted to bring heart back into religion and all that, but surely sometimes those two motivations were conflated. Damn amygdala!

I am all for “bringing heaven to earth,” and think there is something very good and significant about time, and history, and human passion and action. But, in my cynical Freudian modes (luckily they aren’t too often anymore) I do wonder if it isn’t just all about deifying sex (and beer, thrill, and sensible beauties).

But, then again, why wouldn’t we want to justify those things (or, at the very least, find a proper place for them)?

Deum et animam scire cupio; nihil aliud. But how do we know God and Soul?

That One, therefore, since it has no otherness is always present, and we are present to it when we have no otherness; and the One does not desire us, so as to be around us, but we desire it, so that we are around it. And we are always round it but do not always look to it; it is like a choral dance: in the order of its singing the choir keeps round its conductor but may sometimes turn away, so that he is out of their sight, but when it turns back to him it sings beautifully and is truly with him; so we too are always around him—and if we were not, we should be totally dissolved and no longer exist—but not always turned to him; but when we do look to him, then we are at our goal and at rest and do not sing out of tune as we truly dance our god-inspired dance around him.

Man’s lack of power to moderate and restrain the affects I call bondage. For the man who is subject to affects is under the control, not of himself, but of fortune, in whose power he so greatly is that often, though he sees the better for himself, he is still forced to follow the worse.

–Spinoza, Ethics

Disciplined body, disciplined mind, disciplined heart.