⭐️ New blog post, I wrote a probably too-long review on my reading of The Dry Season. Read → here
Kierkegaard, in Works of Love, argues that erotic love and friendship are forms of preference, and preference is self-love wearing another person’s face, it says, I love you because of what you are to me. But the command you shall love cuts underneath that. It makes love a duty, and his imaginative claim is that only as duty does love become free, because it no longer depends on whether the beloved keeps deserving it or whether the tension keeps humming. Febos’s year is a year of discovering that everything she had called love was preference, and that the thing she actually wanted could not be reached through more of it.
“we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others.”
Finished reading: The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without … by Melissa Febos 📚