#the double flame

[mitchtits]

Almost always, love manifests itself as a rupture or violation of the social order; it is a challenge to the customs and institutions of the community. A passion that, uniting the lovers, separates them from society.

The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism by Octavio Paz

[mitchtits]

Human love is the union of two beings subject to time and its accidents: change, sickness, death. Although it does not save us from time, it opens it a crack, so that in a flash love’s contradictory nature is manifest: that vivacity which endlessly destroys itself and is reborn, which is always both now and never. Therefore all love, even the most blissful, is tragic.

Octavio Paz, The Double Flame

[mitchtits]

Without a soul - or whatever one calls the pneuma that makes every man and woman a person - there is no love, but neither is there love without a body. Through the body love is eroticism and thus communicates with the vastest and most deeply hidden forces of life.

Octavio Paz, The Double Flame

[mitchtits]

We live with phantoms, and we ourselves are phantoms.

The Double Flame by Octavio Paz

[mitchtits]

Capitalism has turned Eros into an employee of Mammon.

The Double Flame, Octavio Paz

[mitchtits]

What does the couple see in the space of an instant, a blink of the eye? The equation of appearance and disappearance, the truth of the body and the non-body, the vision of the presence that dissolves into splendour: pure vitality, a heartbeat of time.

The Double Flame: Love, Sex and Eroticism by Octavio Paz (1993)

[mitchtits]

Love is the closest thing on this earth to the beatitude of the blessed.

The Double Flame, Octavio Paz

[kenjiham]

Ngọn lửa nguyên thuỷ ban đầu của sắc dục là tình dục; nó thổi lên ngọn lửa đỏ của sắc dục, để rồi ngọn lửa này lại thổi bùng và nuôi dưỡng ngọn lửa khác, màu xanh và uốn lượn. Đó là ngọn lửa của tình yêu và tình dục. Hai ngọn lửa của cuộc sống.

- Octavio Paz - The double flame