By Maria Popova
That is the supreme problem of intimacy — how you can reconcile the aching craving for closeness with the painful pressures of really being shut, how you can forge a bond tight sufficient to really feel the heat of connection however spacious sufficient to be at liberty.
Kahlil Gibran knew this when he contemplated the vital balance of intimacy and independence, urging lovers to “love each other however make not a bond of affection: Let it reasonably be a transferring sea between the shores of your souls.” Rilke knew it when he reckoned with the difficult art of giving space in love, observing that “even between the closest human beings infinite distances live on.” In consequence, we transfer by way of love in a careless dance of method and withdrawal, attempting to barter the optimum distance for that elusive, ecstatic feeling of spacious togetherness.
Lengthy earlier than Gibran and Rilke, Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788–September 21, 1860) explored this calibration in his 1851 assortment of brief philosophical essays Parerga and Paralipomena (public library), presenting The Porcupine Dilemma — half parable and half thought experiment, illustrating the paradox of intimacy.
He writes:
One chilly winter’s day, numerous porcupines huddled collectively fairly carefully so as by way of their mutual heat to stop themselves from being frozen. However they quickly felt the impact of their quills on each other, which made them once more transfer aside. Now when the necessity for heat as soon as extra introduced them collectively, the disadvantage of the quills was repeated in order that they have been tossed between two evils, till that they had found the right distance from which they may greatest tolerate each other. Thus the necessity for society which springs from the vacancy and monotony of males’s lives, drives them collectively; however their many disagreeable and repulsive qualities and unbearable drawbacks as soon as extra drive them aside. The imply distance which they lastly uncover, and which allows them to endure being collectively [means] that the necessity for mutual heat can be solely imperfectly glad, however then again, the prick of the quills is not going to be felt.
Complement Schopenhauer’s parable with Octavio Paz on how you can inhabit love as “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms” and Alain de Botton on the challenge of closeness, then revisit Schopenhauer on the power of music and the mark of genius.
