WINTER 2026

• Jan 10   Fresh Meaning in Marriage: What Is It & How Can We Have It?

Meaning is the beautiful relation of something to the world. Relation and meaning are quite akin…. The purpose of love is to see oneself better and everything else better. The enclosing way will not work, the possessive way.

In making a thing just for us, we take away its meaning. And that is the danger of possessiveness: it is the great destroyer of meaning. The only way one can be sure in love is to feel, “Being close to this person makes me love the world more; and that is how I want to use the person.”

—Eli Siegel, from The Rightness of Aesthetic Realism: A Periodical

• Feb 14   What Should a Wife Want—to Be Adored, or to Appreciate the World Rightly? (This Includes on Valentine’s Day.)

To appreciate something means to like it by seeing it as it is. In all true appreciation there must be knowledge…. It is very easy not to appreciate something. What people don’t see is that in the process of being unfair to the thing that could be appreciated, they are also unfair to themselves. To appreciate rightly is success in life. The purpose of life is to like the world, and that is another way of saying to appreciate the world.

—Eli Siegel, from Aesthetic Realism and Appreciation

• Mar 14   The Mix-Up in Wives about Coldness & Warmth: Is the Answer in Art?

While people are looking for serenity in love, they want excitement. This is another way of saying we want to be cool and hot at the same time. The relation of coolness to warmth, cold to heat, is a relation in every person. It is a big thing in love. We can get too excited, or we can become cold, and most people are doing one or the other or making a bad mingling of both. In this way, our love is incomplete, and we don’t like it; and our selves are likewise incomplete.

—Eli Siegel, from Poetry and Love

• Apr 11   How Well Do We Listen? or, 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, from What Precedes