Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

Can we learn how to love successfully? And what is love, really? Is there a mix-up about yielding and managing that every couple has? The practical answers that people have thirsted for are in “Love: Two People & the World Itself,” the new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We continue serializing the great 1964 lecture in which Eli Siegel discusses his poem “A Marriage” and speaks about what love truly is. We print here too sections of a paper that sociologist and Aesthetic Realism consultant Devorah Tarrow presented in October, at the public seminar titled “The Mix-up in Women about Managing & Yielding—& the Beautiful Answer!”

“A Marriage” was written in 1930, and appears in its entirety in TRO 1915. It is one of the important poems of America—for what it says about love; and also for its musical might. In his discussion Mr. Siegel points out that the way of seeing in this poem—the way of seeing the world, people, and love—is a prelude to Aesthetic Realism itself, the philosophy he would begin to teach a decade later.

And as Ms. Tarrow makes clear, Aesthetic Realism is teaching men and women today what people have needed to know these many centuries—have needed hugely, achingly. For example, it is the education that shows the following:

1) The purpose of love is to like the world itself through wanting to know, with honesty and depth, another person.

2) The everyday yet tremendous mistake people make about love is to use the “loved one” against the world—to put aside and look down on other people.

3) Using someone close to us to make less of the world and other people is an aspect of the most hurtful thing in the human self: contempt—the feeling we’ll be more if we can diminish and scorn what’s not us.

4) People have thought love was having someone show we are far superior to the rest of reality. Yet as two persons collaborate to make one another royalty in an unworthy world, they resent each other intensely and feel ashamed. That’s because each has betrayed the other’s and one’s own deepest desire: to see reality in all its largeness as a friend.  >> Read more