Christopher Dawson

He [Bertrand Russell] was enough of a puritan and a very conscious intellectual to have to explain to himself every sexual call of nature as a fated invitation to a mystical union of souls, an incurable form of rationalization that got him into perpetual trouble.

Alistair Cooke (speaking of his friend Russell)

[The following is from Bertrand Russell’s autobiography, and concerns events in 1911 when Russell’s first marriage was breaking up.]

The [aesthetic] atmosphere of Ottoline’s house fed something in me that had been starved throughout the years of my first marriage. As soon as I entered it, I felt rested from the rasping difficulties of the outer world. When I arrived there on March 19th, on my way to Paris, I found that Philip [Ottoline’s husband] had unexpectedly had to go to Burnley [Philip’s constituency], so that I was left tête-a-tête with Ottoline. During dinner we made conversation about Burnley, and politics, and the sins of the Government. After dinner the conversation gradually became more intimate. Making timid approaches, I found them to my surprise not repulsed. It had not, until this moment, occurred to me that Ottoline was a woman who would allow me to make love to her, but gradually, as the evening progressed, the desire to make love to her became more and more insistent. At last it conquered, and I found to my amazement that I loved her deeply, and that she returned my feeling... For external and accidental reasons, I did not have full relations with Ottoline that evening, but we agreed to become lovers as soon as possible. My feeling was overwhelmingly strong, and I did not care what might be involved. I wanted to leave Alys [his wife], and to have [Ottoline] leave Philip. What Philip might think or feel was a matter of indifference to me. If I had known that he would murder us both (as Mrs. Whitehead assured me he would) I should have been willing to pay that price for one night.

Bertrand Russell

We must not give unconditional obedience to the voice of Eros even when he speaks like a god. But neither must we ignore or attempt to deny the god-like quality.

C. S. Lewis

Freud and his followers considered emotional energy to be specifically sexual in nature. According to this hypothesis the only really authentic form of emotional communication between people would be sexual love. Jung, on the other hand, had a much truer view of the matter. Emotional energy is essentially undifferentiated and can be put to different uses by the will provided circumstances allow.

Fr. Ignace Lepp (psychotherapist)

Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into friendship.

Lord Byron

[Hesketh Pearson was a British writer whose biographies sold well in the 1930-40s.]

Throughout the Thirties what Pearson called ‘the most vital part of my life’ was a dark, vivacious Jewish actress named Dorothy Dunkels. She was nearly twenty years younger than he and, because of that, he at first avoided sexual intimacy. But after six weeks of ‘a gradually weakening resistance’ they became lovers and remained intermittently so for nine years. ‘Fascinating, infuriating, seductive, aloof, shameless, sensitive, cruel, tender: she could play all the emotional notes in quick succession, and leave me quivering with lust or quiescent with love or tingling with admiration or coldly critical.’

Gladys (Pearson’s wife) could no more help making scenes over Hesketh’s infidelities then he could help repeating them. She eventually found out about Dorothy which led to ‘agonizing emotional scenes’ when Hesketh swore that he would break it off. There followed the cowardly letters trying to rupture from a distance what one wishes only to nurture when together; the feeling of utter emptiness when all the lights seem to have gone out and only one person can illuminate the darkness; the desolating loneliness in which he would see her or telephone her or write to her once again, and the cycle would start over. Although capable of decisiveness (as his military record attests) he was irresolute when at the mercy of sensuality. Like many men, when lust was in the ascendancy, common sense flew out of the window.

Richard Ingrams

The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. Simply to relapse from it, merely to “fall out of” love again is—if I may coin the ugly word—a sort of disredemption.

C. S. Lewis

Love is what we call the situation which occurs when two people who are sexually compatible discover that they can also tolerate one another in various other circumstances.   NEW LINK (Mar 30/13)