TheFourLoves - (EPUB全文下载)

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AFFECTION
I begin with the humblest and most widely diffused of loves, the love in which
our experience seems to differ least from that of the animals. Let me add at
once that I do not on that account give it a lower value. Nothing in Man is
either worse or better for being shared with the beasts. When we blame a man
for being "a mere animal," we mean not that he displays animal characteristics
(we all do) but that he displays these, and only these, on occasions where the
specifically human was demanded. (When we call him "brutal" we usually
mean that he commits cruelties impossible to most real brutes; they're not clever
enough.)
The Greeks called this love storge (two syllables and the g is "hard").
I shall here call it simply Affection. My Greek Lexicon defines storge as "affection,
especially of parents to offspring"; but also of offspring to parents.
And that, I have no doubt, is the original form of the thing as well as the
central meaning of the word. The image we must start with is that of a mother
nursing a baby; a bitch or a cat with a basketful of puppies or kittens; all
in a squeaking, nuzzling heap together; purr-ings, lickings, baby-talk, milk,
warmth, the smell of young life.
The importance of this image is that it presents us at the very outset with
a certain paradox. The Need and Need-love of the young is obvious; so is the
Gift-love of the mother. She gives birth, gives suck, gives protection. On the
other hand, she must give birth or die. She must give suck or suffer. That way,
her Affection too is a Need-love. There is the paradox. It is a Need-love but
what it needs is to give. It is a Gift-love but it needs to be needed. We shall
have to return to this point.
But even in animal life, and still more in our own, Affection extends far beyond
the relation of mother and young. This warm comfortableness, this satisfaction
in being together, takes in all sorts of objects. It is indeed the least discriminating
of loves. There are women for whom we can predict few wooers and men who are
likely to have few friends. They have nothing to^-offer. But almost anyone can
become an object of Affection; the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating.
There need be no apparent fitness between those whom it unites. I have seen
it felt for an imbecile not only by his parents but by his brothers. It ignores
the barriers of age, sex, class and education. It can exist betw ............

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