WINTER 2023

• Jan 14   The Confusion in Marriage about Affecting and 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

• Feb 11   Jealousy: What It Really Comes from & What Can 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

• Mar 11   What Does It Mean to Have Good Will for the Person We Marry?

“Right now, many homes in America are seats of dissension, worry because good will is seen as an insincere yielding. Good will as it truly is, is kindness, surely; but it is also criticism.  One definition of good will is the oneness of kindness and criticism in a person’s mind.

“One cannot be just to an individual unless the desire to be just to the world or all that is not ourselves is a true thing, a strong thing, a constant thing….

“If the idea of having good will does not bring to one the high points of all the good orchestras of the world, and all the subtleties that scientists have come to, the good will is not complete.”

—Eli Siegel, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, no. 71

• Apr 8   Silences & Conversations in Marriage: How Can We Make Sense of These?

“People can live together for years and really not transmit what they feel to each other. The fields that are not subjects of communication between the ordinary couple are tremendous. All the things that haven’t been said and could have been said, if brought together, would dazzle people with their revelatory quality and their beauty, maybe—also their surprisingness. Communication is the way a person makes his or her thoughts part of another person’s life, or thoughts. You have to respect and like what you express yourself to before the job of communication can have a fair chance.”

—Eli Siegel, from Aesthetic Realism Looks at Things: Communication