FALL 2026

• Sep 12  The Big, Puzzling, & Beautiful Matter of Need in Marriage! 

Love has been called by Aesthetic Realism “proud need.” Every person would like to be secret, sequestered, alone, do things for oneself, and every person wants to be loved without limit. It can make for great trouble. When we’re involved with a person and we’re not proud that we need that person, there has to be anger. There’s a certain false pleasure we have in showing we don’t need anybody. Aesthetic Realism says good sense is the needing more and the being proud of it.

—Eli Siegel, from an Aesthetic Realism Lesson

• Oct 10  Jealousy: What Does It Really Come From & What Should Take Its Place?

To love a person is to wish to please that person; but one sees oneself as cooperating with the whole world to please—not as being in competition with it….In the love that is accurate, jealousy is not possible….In every instance, despite the sultry, seemingly noble literature written around jealousy, the thing itself, no matter how frequent, is a bourgeois state of mind, a possessive state of mind in which self-love truculently and imposingly stalks and maneuvers as love for an object.

—Eli Siegel, “Love and Reality,” Self and World

• Nov 14  Understanding a Spouse—Is it Possible? Necessary? Thrilling?     

A person is deeper, more in relation with the universe than people wish to grant, and the arrangement of things in him or her is more intricate, flexible, diverse, surprising than people see….

If someone is to know us, we must feel that person sees us as representing reality. If we feel that someone sees us in a confined way, in a cozy way, only, we do not feel we are understood. We want to be seen as a moving assemblage of light and shade: we abhor being summed up.

—Eli Siegel, from “On a Person’s Not Being Known”

• Dec 12  In Marriage—What Does It Really Mean to Be Kind? 

One way the large problem can be put is this: how to be kind without limit and at the same time take care of oneself without limit. The idea is always to feel that in being nice to something, you are nice to yourself. If in being nice to something you are not being nice to yourself, you are sacrificial. The only kindness, as Aesthetic Realism sees it, that exists is the desire for the other person to be more complete, more organized, stronger, more himself or herself.

—Eli Siegel, from Mind and Kindness