SPRING-SUMMER 2025

• May 10   The Confusion in Marriage about Affecting & Being Affected 

To live is to master and to yield—this was said in Victorian times. People have a tremendous difficulty about that, because they would like to manage and tell things what to do. The desire to yield, which goes along with being respectful, is not so popular.

The thing, then, to see is whether by the very nature of existence or your life, you’re trying to make a one of being affected and affecting. There are two kinds of power. There is the power of affecting. But also, there is the power of receptivity, of getting impressions.

A sensible person is one who sees beauty both in impression and expression, which is the same as being affected and affecting. Certain painters are called impressionists and certain painters are called expressionists; both can be good.

—Eli Siegel, from an Aesthetic Realism Lesson

• June 14   Understanding vs. Summing Up One’s Spouse: The Enormous, Beautiful, & Urgent Difference

There can be no such thing as love without knowledge. Where there isn’t knowledge, you are really loving somebody else—somebody you made up…. A person is a relation: there is nothing he or she doesn’t have to do with. Whenever we see a person we should try to apprehend that relation.

…When we understand a person we see that person as having all kinds of unexplainable relations, and explainable, too; and yet as a point, something definite.

—Eli Siegel, Aesthetic Realism and People

• July 12   What Makes a Wife’s Insistence Right or Wrong? 

Insistence is what we all do. Like other aspects of mind, it can be good and bad. We have a possibility of insistence on having our way and to hell with everything else. We have also the insistence which is a good thing: on liking ourselves and understanding things.

A wife can insist on an attitude that she has to her spouse, and an attitude her spouse should have to her. We need to understand how we can insist on something which is as necessary as a hole in the head.

—Eli Siegel, from Mind and Insistence

• August 9   The Drama about Closeness & Remoteness in Marriage 

The large inward catastrophe of today is: We let ourselves be pleased by and do what we can to please a person we still want to hide from, we still do not fully respect. The one way we can fully respect a person is to feel that that person deserves wholly to know us and it would be good for us to know that person….To know a person is to know the universe become throbbingly specific. It is always the universe on two feet, with two eyes, and an articulate mouth. It is the universe we want to skip.

—Eli Siegel, from Preface to “The Ordinary Doom”