Sinister: are you the lover or the beloved?

[stacey dahling]

ooh...lovely miss lyndsey's lovely post reminded me that i wanted to send 
y'all an excerpt from the ballad of the sad cafe. it regards all this crazy 
love business. and that's the last i'll say on that issue (i hope).
in other news: it stopped raining. the sun is shining. i'm leaving the 
house. you must all see amelie. and belle and sebastian still rawks.

>From The Ballad of the Sad Café
By Carson McCullers

	First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons - but the fact 
that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience 
to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these 
two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for 
all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time 
hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his 
love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it 
is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the 
lover to do. He must create for himself a whole new inward world - a word 
intense and strange, complete in himself.
	Now, the beloved can be of any description. The most outlandish people can 
be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and 
still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one 
afternoon two decades past. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed 
and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as 
anyone else - but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A 
most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant 
and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. Therefore, the value and 
quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
	It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. 
Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep 
secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many, the beloved 
fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is 
forever trying to bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation 
with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.


_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
        +---+  Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list  +---+
     To send to the list mail sinister at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
     send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
     majordomo at missprint.org.  WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister
 +-+       "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper           +-+
 +-+  "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+
 +-+    "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000     +-+
 +-+  "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000  +-+
 +-+  "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001   +-+
 +-+               Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa                 +-+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+