For his birthday A. wanted to go to the Forest Park cemetery to visit the radical's graves. Voltairine de Cleyre, a not-widely known anarchist writer and speaker is buried there. As a feminist, Voltairine's poetry and writing is often critical of marriage, to the degree that I often find quite funny. She makes a passionate case not only against marriage, but also for not spending too much time with your beloved in her essay "They Who Marry Do Ill":
Nowadays I would say that I prefer to see a marriage based purely on business considerations, than a marriage based on love. That is not because I am in the least concerned with the success of the marriage, but because I am concerned with the success of love. And I believe that the easiest, surest and most applicable method of killing love is marriage --marriage as I have defined it. I believe that the only way to preserve love in anything like the ecstatic condition which renders it worthy of a distinctive name --otherwise it is either lust or simply friendship --is to maintain the distances. Never allow love to be vulgarized by the indecencies of continuous close communion. Better to be in familiar contempt of your enemy than the one you love.
No comments:
Post a Comment