FALL 2024

• Sep 14   What Is Real Romance in Marriage—After 2 Months, 2 Years, & Always?

Our biggest desire is to feel that the big world in which we are is something that makes us grow, something that makes us what we want to be….[But so often] two people marry, and they say, “We don’t care for the rest of the world; we’ve got ourselves.” They have enclosed themselves in an amorous sphere. In this, which is blissful, there is also a deep objection. The two come to feel limited by it; it gets wearisome; it is not a means of expansion….The purpose of liking a person is to like other persons. Aesthetic Realism says that no one can be successfully in love until that person wants to love the world.

—Eli Siegel, from Aesthetic Realism and Love

• Oct 12   Is the Way a Wife Worries Useful or Hurtful?

There are some things that it is quite clear one should worry about. How to worry—that is something else. There are ailments to worry about, and money, love, domesticity. They get mingled, because a person may worry on the same day about a spouse, and about a carpenter, and then about whether she really understood Edith Wharton….The biggest thing we’re worried about is something we don’t know we’re worried about: most people don’t say, “I don’t care enough for things not myself.”

—Eli Siegel, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #1649

• Nov 9   Praise: Can a Wife Be Sensible about It? 

There are many women who have been praised…and have felt, nevertheless, that something not so good was being encouraged in them or evoked from them. The Aesthetic Realism viewpoint is that if anything is flattering to yourself and doesn’t make the whole world look better in your eyes, that which is flattery is only flattery—it’s not useful praise. We all of us want praise of ourselves; and the need to look into the nature of the praise can be not so welcome. But once we are not critical of why we’re praised, there can be a letdown that is too great. The most important thing about praise of yourself is that you should be able to believe it and be proud that you believe it.

—Eli Siegel, from “The Trouble about Praise”

• Dec 14   Longed for in Marriage: The Oneness of Encouragement & Criticism

Aesthetic Realism sees good will as the aesthetic oneness of encouragement and criticism….One of the reasons many married people can’t talk to each other is that these two motives, wanting to be critical and also wanting to be sympathetic or considerate, cannot be managed right: if you’re considerate you are not critical, and if you’re critical you’re not considerate. But in the nature of things there is no reason why one can’t be both considerate and critical….The problem of being both compassionate and critical, of being both severe and feathery, is an aesthetic problem, a problem that, if solved, will always be like art.

—Eli Siegel, from The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known