Thomas Mann: "Doctor Faustus. The Life of German Composer Adrian Leverkühn. As told by a friend. (*3)"

Happy 2014 everybody!!!!!!

"Of course, there is no way to separate sensuality and love. One best acquits love of the charge of sensuality by reversing things and proving there is an element of love in sensuality. Lust for another person’s flesh means one has to overcome the resistance already blocking it, which is based in the strangeness of the I and the you, of the self and the other. The flesh—to retain the Christian term—is normally repulsed by everything except itself. It wants nothing to do with strange flesh. But when another person suddenly becomes the object of lust and desire, the relation between the I and the you is so drastically changed that it makes ‘sensuality’ an empty word. One cannot do without the concept of love, even when ostensibly nothing spiritual is involved. Every sensual act implies tenderness, after all, is an act of giving even as lust is taking, is happiness in making another happy, a demonstration of love."