WINTER 2021

• Apr 10 – “The Art of Listening in Marriage”

Right now there are quite a few homes in the New York area where someone says, “Something is amiss—I was talking and he/she didn’t seem to be listening to me.“  Since listening is so much a part of life, we should ask: Do I expect anything very much from listening? People do expect a great deal listening to music, but there is another listening that people have pretty much given up on. Listening should be accompanied with comprehension. It’s an artistic, deep, compassionate, and critical thing.

—Eli Siegel, What Precedes  

• May 8 – “Is the Way a Wife Worries Useful or Hurtful?”

There are some things that it is quite clear one should worry about. How to worry–that is something else. There are ailments to worry about, and money, love, domesticity. They get mingled, because a person may worry on the same day about a spouse, and about a carpenter, and then about whether she really understood Edith Wharton….The biggest thing we’re worried about is something we don’t know we’re worried about: most people don’t say, “I don’t care enough for things not myself.”

—Eli Siegel, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #1649

• June 12 – “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