Steven Weiner, Computer Specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

As two people are devoted to one another, is there something outside of them on which their love depends? Do two people judge themselves and each other on: how just are we to the world itself?  Do we love a person if we don’t want to encourage him or her to like the world? Read “Love—& the Mistake,” the important, exciting current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is a new installment of the great, stirring, immensely educating, historic, infinitely kind lecture by Eli Siegel that we have been serializing. (And I mean every adjective and adverb.) In that 1964 lecture he discussed his poem “A Marriage”—written 34 years earlier. The ideas in it, he said, are a prelude to what would be taught in Aesthetic Realism lessons. And they are a prelude to what people are learning about love in Aesthetic Realism consultations now.

The poem, one of the most beautiful in American literature, is composed of 20 sections. In this issue we have Mr. Siegel’s discussion of sections 12 through 18. (The whole poem is reprinted in TRO 1915.)

What is love? What is it for? And what is the big mistake people make about it? What is it that ruins love? People want the answers to those questions as achingly as they ever did. And they’re not getting them from the various mental practitioners, relationship counselors, articles, talk shows, and websites. The answers are in Aesthetic Realism. For instance, in issue 150 of the present journal, Mr. Siegel writes:

Love is a means of liking the world through a person.…When we use a person not to like the world but to make ourselves important or successful, we are having contempt both for that person and the world.

…Love is either a possibility of seeing the world differently because something different from ourselves is seen as needed and lovely; or it is an extension of our imperialistic approval of ourselves in such a way that we have a carnal satellite.

That last sentence, eloquent and vivid, is classic. It explains with grandeur (also humor) so much of today’s social life, victories, and ensuing tears.

In the present issue of TRO, Mr. Siegel is showing that the big matter in love and marriage is: how do we encourage another person to feel about the world?... >>Read more