Thursday, February 22, 2007

Passion

I was looking up a quite a different subject last night when I happened on this. It was too good not to share!

But women are, generally speaking, intense creatures. This is not necessarily bad. Passion comes in handy in the search for romantic love; it is also well suited to motherhood and to the religious life. But in a cynical culture that trivializes anything transcendent, a woman's passionate nature will be directed against herself. As Marya puts it, with her innocent precision: "I felt like yearning was specific to me, and the guilt that it brought was mine alone." ....


....But why? Maybe it is normal for a young woman to be "intense," and being cavalier is what is strange. Maybe wanting to forge bonds with others is normal, and it's cutting ourselves off from enduring attachments that is perverse. Maybe not having "rejection sensitivity" is what is sick, and invulnerability to loss is the real pathology. ...

Incidentally, if you're not sensitive to rejection, doesn't that also mean you're indifferent to love?

Wendy Shalit's "Return to Modesty" p. 170

I like that last line: "if you're not sensitive to rejection, doesn't that mean you're indifferent to love?"

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