Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love.

Buddha

Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.

Erich Fromm, Art Of Loving

The act of encountering art is the only art.

Jordan Yunus, Subject To Infinite Change

Art is a weapon against despair. It is a tool with which to alleviate a sense of crushing isolation and uniqueness.

It provides common ground where sadness in me can, with dignity and intelligence, meet sadness in you.

Alain de Botton, Therapeutic Journey

What makes a reader keep reading? Or, actually: What makes my reader keep reading? How would we know?

The only method by which we can know is to read what we’ve written assuming that our reader reads pretty much the way we do. What bores us will bore her. What gives us a little burst of pleasure will light her up too.

And come to think of it, what we’re doing (or at least what I’m doing, when I revise) is not so much trying to perfectly imagine another person reading my story, but to imitate myself reading it, if I were reading it for the first time.

In a strange way, that’s the whole skill: to be able to lapse into a reasonable impersonation of yourself reading as if the prose in front of you (which you’ve already read a million times) was entirely new to you.

This manifests to the reader as evidence of care. We might say that a first-time reader is able to intuit the many less-cared-for-versions of a sentence behind the one the writer let stand.

Some conversations feel evasive, ill-considered, agenda-laced, selfish; others feel intense, urgent, generous, truthful. What’s the difference? Well, I’d say it’s presence. Are we there or not? Is the person across the table there (to us) or not?

We might understand revision as a way of practicing relationship; seeing what, when we do it, improves the relationship between ourselves and the reader. What makes it more intense, direct, and honest? What drives it into the ditch?

The exciting thing is that we’re not doomed to ask these questions abstractly; we get to ask them locally, by running our meter over the phrases, sentences, sections, etc., that make up our story, while assuming some continuity of reaction between the reader and ourselves.

To be a writer, I only need to read a specific sentence, in its particular context, on a given day, changing the sentence as it occurs to me to do so.

Then do that again, over and over, until I’m pleased.

George Saunders, Swim In Pond In Rain

The male’s branch display comes to an abrupt halt when he spots a female in the next-door enclosure. She’s walking around with a prominent genital swelling on her behind that is typical of her species. Usually a female in this condition will move nonchalantly, as if she doesn’t notice all the male eyes glued to her derrière.

However, this female briefly stands still behind the fence to shake her pink balloon, making it jiggle like a pudding. While doing so, she stares directly into the male’s eyes as if asking:

“What do you think of this?”

Frans de Waal, Different

Now won’t you wobble, wobble?
Let me see you shake it, shake it

504 Boyz, Wobble Wobble

I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly.

Destiny’s Child, Bootylicious

All that jelly and no toast.

Denzel Washington, Training Day

If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life.

It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation.

However, this type of love is not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more of its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement.

There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.

The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.

What are the necessary steps in learning any art? The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice.

I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one—my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art.

But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art:

Mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art.

Erich Fromm, Art Of Loving

I start to think
And then I sink
Into the paper
Like I was ink

When I’m writing
I’m trapped in between the lines
I escape
When I finish the rhyme

I got soul

Eric B & Rakim, I Know You Got Soul