In many ways, Twain and Waugh were strikingly similar. Even within the group of great humorists, they belong together. Both anti-e...rotic imaginations, they stress male comradeships and represent love-relationships most conventionally and sentimentally. They both show society as dominated by fools and bores, and fate as characterized by betrayal and disaster--life as subordinate to death. For that reason, no doubt, both are much interested in militarism and the machinery of death, as well as in the military and manly virtues. Both men tell jokes that belong to the bar where magistrates gather, managers, captains, men who take responsibility for law and order. Both were quickly irritated by most real clubs and bars. One might say that both belonged to the same cultural type.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come natural...ly to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our "natural" attitude toward the "other" is one of either indifference or hostility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, ...excessive ... and impoverished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already unde...rstand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this e...vening.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »