Devorah Tarrow, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
“The Trouble about Closeness & Remoteness in Marriage—& the Aesthetic Answer” will be the subject of the Understanding Marriage! class on Saturday, February 10th, from 11 am-12:30 pm. Aesthetic Realism consultants Barbara Allen, Anne Fielding, and Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman conduct this monthly class, the basis of which is in the following statement by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism: “Marriage is a means for liking the world through a person. Too often, though, marriage is a contemptuous exclusion of the world.”
Even as wives and husbands do things together and worry about each other, and even as there is physical closeness, many a wife has had the pained feeling that there is a remoteness between herself and her husband. Meanwhile, many a husband feels his wife doesn’t want him to know what’s within her mind, and isn’t interested in what’s within his. Aesthetic Realism asks: Is there something a woman needs to see about a desire in her to keep herself hidden and apart—a desire that’s an aspect of contempt?
These deeply keen and thrilling sentences from Mr. Siegel’s Preface to his essay The Ordinary Doom will be taken up:
The large inward catastrophe of today is: We let ourselves be pleased by and do what we can to please a person we still want to hide from, we still do not fully respect. The one way we can fully respect a person is to feel that that person deserves wholly to know us and it would be good for us to know that person.
To know a person is to know the universe become throbbingly specific. It is always the universe on two feet, with two eyes, and an articulate mouth. It is the universe we want to skip.
What a beautiful, honest way of seeing a person! Each woman will be learning that her largest desire is to like the world, and that desire includes wanting to comprehend the depths of her husband, and wanting to be known by him. She’ll learn too that to hope to know with kind and eager interest who her husband is, is the means to love and romance the likes of which she hasn’t known before!
The fee for the class is $10. For more information, call 212.777.4490.