09w22:1 Shakespeare's Blog XIX

by timothy. 0 Comments

May 25th
And yet the strangeness is that they may feed both my hungers best by showing those hungers so clearly separate and apart. For soul and body can never be fed toegther for all our pretence of the unity of love. For love is one word but many things; love is a unity only in the word. With her I find the beast’s heaven which is the angel’s hell; with him, the body’s hunger now able to be set aside, there is that most desirable of sorts of love, that which Plato did hymn. And then the devil with me says: Yet thou dost admire his beauty of form, it is an impure love. I dream of our somehow gravely dancing a pavane or sarabande, all three, in whose movement the reconciling of the beast and the angel may, in myself, be accomplished. I would, in some manner, wish to share her with him, him with her, but perhaps only a poet may think in these high terms, not understandable of either the soul (giver) or body (taker). And so I wait to be told that I lose both a mistress and a friend.

(Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun, p.156-157)

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