OCTAVIO PAZ – THE DOUBLE FLAME (LOVE AND EROTICISM)

Pag. 21 – The libertine always needs the Other, and this is his damnation: he depends on
his object and is the slave of his victim.
Pag. 24 – Shakespeare and Stendhal tell us more about erotic passion and its mystery that
do Sade and his modern disciples as they struggle bitterly to transform it into a
philosophical discourse.
Pag. 38 – Sex is the root, eroticism the stem, and love the flower. And the fruit? The
fruits of love are intangible. This is one of love’s mysteries.
Pag. 41 – In the Orient, love, however violent its transgressions, was lived and reflected
on within religion; it could constitute a sin but not heresy. In the West, love developed
outside religion and even in opposition to it. Occidental love is the offspring of
philosophy and of the poetic sentiment that transfigures into an image everything it
touches. Thus for us love has been a cult.
Pag. 46 – All men suffer from a lack: their days are numbered, they are mortal. The
aspiration to immortality is a trait that unites and defines all men.
Pag. 53 – I pointed out the affinities between eroticism and poetry: the first a metaphor of
sexuality, the second an eroticization of language.
Pag. 59 – We love what we do not value and we desire to be forever with a person who
makes us unhappy.
Pag. 85 – There is no love without feminine freedom.
Pag. 87 – Voluntary union is love’s necessary condition, the act that turns bondage into
freedom.
Pag. 107 – (Shakespeare’s nightingales to Lope de Vega’s skylarks
Pair of nightingales
that sings the whole night long,
and I with my beautiful friend.
beneath the arbor in flower
until the lookout shouts
at the top of the tower:
on your feet, lovers, it’s time now,
dawn is descending from the mountaintop!
Pag. 136 – Aristotle says that there are three kinds of friendship: friendship out of interest
or usefulness, friendship out of pleasure, and “perfect friendship, that of good men of
similar virtue, because each equally desires the good for the other.”
Pag. 137 – The first two kinds of friendship are circumstantial and destined to last only a
short time: the third is enduring and one of the highest goods to which man can aspire.
Pag. 139 – Therefore he agrees with the ancients: the female sex is incapable of
friendship.
Pag. 140 – In relationships between women, backbiting, envy, gossip, jealousy, and
pretty perfidies are frequent.
Pag 142/145 – The first element of love is exclusivity. In these pages I have referred to it
several times, arguing that it marks the boundary between love and the larger territory of
eroticism. Eroticism is social and appears in all places and eras. There is no society
without erotic rites and practices, from the most innocuous to the most bloody. Eroticism
is the human dimension of sexuality, what imagination adds to nature. An example:
copulation face to face, in which the two participants look into each other’s eyes, is a
human invention and not a practice of any of the other mammals. But love is individual,
or, more exactly, interpersonal: we want only one person, and we ask that person to love
us with the same exclusivity. Exclusivity requires reciprocity, the assent of the other, his
or her free will. Hence the exclusivity of love entails another of its basic elements:
freedom. Yet another proof of what I pointed out earlier, that none of the basic elements
has a life of its own: each is related to the others; each determines the others and is
determined by them.
Yet each is invariable. The exclusivity of love is an absolute condition: without it there
can be no love. But it is not the sole condition: the other elements must participate as
well, to a greater or lesser degree. The desire for exclusivity alone can be mere eagerness
for possession. This was the passion analyzed with such subtlety by Marcel Proust. True
love consists precisely of the transformation of the appetite for possession into surrender.
This is why love seeks reciprocity and hence radically departs from the old relationship
of domination and servitude. The exclusivity of love is the foundation of all the other
elements, the focal point around which the others revolve. The requirement of exclusivity
is a mystery: Why do we love this person and not another? A mystery explained only by
recourse to other mysteries, such as the myth of the androgyne in the Symposium. The
exclusivity of love is a facet of another great mystery: the human person.
Many gradations and nuances lie between exclusivity and promiscuity. We say that
without exclusivity there can be no love, but isn’t infidelity the daily bread of couples? It
is indeed. Which proves that Ibn Hazm, Guinicelli, Shakespeare, and Stendhal were not
wrong: that love is a passion almost everyone venerates but that few, very few, actually
experience. Of course, in this as in everything else, there are degrees. Infidelity may be a
matter of consent or not, and either frequent or occasional. If practiced by only one
partner, it causes the other suffering and humiliation. The unfaithful party is insensitive,
cruel, incapable of true love. If the infidelity is by mutual consent, engaged in by both
parties, there may be a lowering of the tension of passion: the couple, lacking the strength
to do what passion requires, decides to relativize the relationship. Is this love? It is,
rather, erotic complicity. Many people say that in such cases passion turns into
friendship. Montaigne would have immediately protested: friendship is an affection as
exclusive as love, or even more so. Permission to be unfaithful is an arrangement, or a
resignation. But love is strict, and like libertinism, although in the opposite direction, an
asceticism. If Sade saw with extraordinary clear-sightedness that the libertine aspires to
insensibility, to see the Other only as an object, the person in love seeks total union and
therefore turns the object into a subject. As for occasional infidelity, it too is a failing, a
weakness. It can and should be forgiven, because we are imperfect beings, and everything
we do is marked by the stigma of our original imperfection. And what is we love two
persons at the same time? That is always a matter of a temporary conflict: often it comes
about the moment of transition between one love and another. Choice, which is the proof
of love, invariable resolves the conflict, at times cruelly. It seems to me that these
examples suffice to show that exclusivity, though it is seldom adhered to wholly, is the
necessary condition for love.
Pag. 160 – Through love we steal from the time that kills us a few hours which we turn
now into paradise and now into hell. In both ways time expands and ceases to be a
measure. Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity: it
does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open
just a crack: here is there and now is always. In love, everything is two and everything
strives to be one.
Pag. 249 – Among the novels that predict the future, the one that most resembles our
world today is not Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four but Huxley’s Brave New World.
Pag. 262 – A cruel paradox: the extreme sensitivity of lovers is the reverse side of their
indifference, no less extreme, toward everything that is not their love. The great danger
that trips up lovers, the deadly trap into which many fall, is self-absorption. The
punishment is not long in coming: they see nothing and no one except themselves, until
they turn to stone…or grow bored.
(…)
Love, any love, is made up of time, and no love can avoid the great catastrophe: the
beloved is subject to the assaults of age, infirmity, and death.
Pag. 264 – Love, too, is an answer: because it is time and made of time, love is at once
consciousness of death and an attempt to make of the instant an eternity. All lovers are
ill-starred, because all are made of time, all are the fragile bond between two temporal
creatures who know they are going to die. In all loves, even the most tragic, there is an
instant of happiness that it is no exaggeration to call superhuman: it is a victory over
time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is a here, where nothing changes and
everything that is, truly is.
Pag. 265 – Love is suffering and heartache, because it is a lack and the desire to possess
what we lack; in turn, it is happiness, because it is possession, even though the possession
lasts but a moment.