The Saunterer

Louise Bourgeois on a consequence of self-imposing blindness

    Repress from your sensibility the terrible things in the world, and it turns you into an unselective hater. Listen to Louise Bourgeois:

    Blindness came from the blush I experienced at the side of the people around me. . . . As I say, my father was promiscuous. I had to be blind to the mistress who lived with us. I had to be blind to the pain of my mother. I had to be blind to the fact I was a little bit sadistic with my brother. I was blind to the fact my sister slept with the man across the street. I had an almost revulsion of everybody - everything and everybody.

    (Quoted from page 56 of Louise Bourgeois, edited by Frances Morris. Rizzoli, 2008.) For a brief biography of Louise Bourgeois, click here. For images of and relating to Louise Bourgeois, click here.

C. S. Lewis on love as a means of escape from oneself

    C. S. Lewis supplies one solution to the appeal of nature and art:

    In love we escape from our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are. The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandise himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; “he that loseth his life shall save it.”
    (Quoted from page 138 of An Experiment in Criticism, by C. S. Lewis. Cambridge University Press, 1969.)
    For a brief biography of C. S. Lewis, click here. For images of and relating to C. S. Lewis, click here.