Need
Except in extremity, we rarely beg for what we truly need.
We are most radical when we acknowledge the simplicity of our aims and urges.
If we hate our own needs, we will find ourselves needing to hate more and more.
We have to meet our needs in the sense of making their acquaintance before we can meet them in the sense of using them to make satisfaction possible.
If someone provides us with what we have needed desperately for a long time, we are sure to respond not just with love and gratitude but also with hatred and resentment, because they have, as we experience it, been so slow in coming. What possible excuse can they give us for their indifference?
Music
When we listen to music, we submerge ourselves in a specific mental medium in which we move as easily as and gracefully as whales or dolphins do in water.
At the end of the concert, as in a relay race, the conductor passes the baton to each one of us and we are left to carry the music on in our minds to its intimate and ultimate destination.
Music is the mammalian quest for dawn.
Parting
To part is not just to die a little, as the French would have it, but also to be born a little. It is this contradiction at the core of the experience that makes it so confusing for us.
Peace
Peace is a disposition of tensions, not an absence of them.
Tears make peace. Tears unwept are as powerful an explosive as any
Marriage
We may be disappointed in our spouses at once because they are too much like our parents and because they are too little like our parents.
While more fortunate marriage may have the character and fervor of non-peaceful coexistence, all too many marriages devolve into states of peaceful co-nonexistence.
A wife, a husband, can be a life, or only a storage device, a cabinet in which we lock away the secrets of our own abandoned hearts.