the art of loving

I just finished read the Book of Eric From “the art of loving”. I liked the book a lot, and I agree with what this guy says in his book. But in the last chapter, I had a surprise. Practically, the guy explain in simple words what art is and how to “practice” it, so to speak. So I will leave here a piece that I really will ask you to read it, this of course if you really are interested in this.

 

"the practice of any art has certain general requirements, 
quite regardless of whether we deal with the art of carpentry, 
medicine, or the art of love. First of all, the practice of an art 
requires discipline. I shall never be good at anything if I do 
not do it in a disciplined way; anything I do only if "I am 
in the mood" may be a nice or amusing hobby, but I shall 
never become a master in that art. But the problem is not 
only that of discipline in the practice of the particular art 
(say practicing every day a certain amount of hours) but it 
is that of discipline in one's whole life. One might think that~ 
nothing is easier to learn for modern man than discipline. 
Does he not spend eight hours a day in a most disciplined 
way at a job which is strictly routinized? The fact, however, 
is that modern man has exceedingly little self-discipline out- 
side of the sphere of work. When he does not work, he wants 
to be lazy, to slouch or, to use a nicer word, to "relax." This 
very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routini- 
zation of life. Just because man is forced for eight hours a 
day to spend his energy for purposes not his own, in ways 
not his own, but prescribed for him by the rhythm of the 
work, he rebels and his rebelliousness takes the form of an 
infantile self-indulgence. In addition, in the battle against 
authoritarianism he has become distrustful of all discipline, 
of that enforced by irrational authority, as well as of rational 
discipline imposed by himself. Without such discipline, how- 
ever, life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacks in concentra- 
tion.

That concentration is a necessary condition for the mastery of an art is hardly necessary to prove. 
Anyone who ever 
tried to learn an art knows this. Yet, even more than self- 
discipline, concentration is rare in our culture. On the con- 
trary, our culture leads to an unconcentrated and diffused 
mode of life, hardly paralleled anywhere else. You do many 
things at once; you read, listen to the radio, talk, smoke, 
eat, drink. You are the consumer with the open mouth, eager 
and ready to swallow everything — pictures, liquor, knowl- 
edge. This lack of concentration is clearly shown in our 
difficulty in being alone with ourselves. To sit still, without 
talking, smoking, reading, drinking, is impossible for most 
people. They become nervous and fidgety, and must do 
something with their mouth or their hands. (Smoking is one 
of the symptoms of this lack of concentration; it occupies 
hand, mouth, eye and nose. ) 

A third factor is patience. Again, anyone who ever tried 
to master an art knows that patience is necessary if you want 
to achieve anything. If one is after quick results, one never 
learns an art. Yet, for modern man, patience is as difficult to 
practice as discipline and concentration. Our whole indus- 
trial system fosters exactly the opposite: quickness. All our 
machines are designed for quickness: the car and airplane 
bring us quickly to our destination — and the quicker the 
better. The machine which can produce the same quantity 
in half the time is twice as good as the older and slower one. 
Of course, there are important economic reasons for this. 
But, as in so many other aspects, human values have become 
determined by economic values. What is good for machines 
must be good for man — so goes the logic. Modern man 
thinks he loses something — time — when he does not do
things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the 
time he gains — except kill it. 

Eventually, a condition of learning any art is a supreme 
concern with the mastery of the art. If the art is not some- 
thing of supreme importance, the apprentice will never learn 
it. He will remain, at best, a good dilettante, but will never 
become a master. This condition is as necessary for the art 
of loving as for any other art. It seems, though, as if the 
proportion between masters and dilettantes is more heavily 
weighted in favor of the dilettantes in the art of loving than 
is the case with other arts. "

come on guys, it's not so long the text, huh?
and to finish this post I will show another cover made last week

This cover I´ve made it for E.M.Kaplan and the title is The Condolence Screener