In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
Interpretation
The quote critiques self-love as a modern trend and suggests that loving someone else is viewed as betrayal.
Russell Baker's quote reflects on contemporary attitudes towards self-love, positing that in a society that promotes selfishness and narcissism, acknowledging love for another person could be seen as a betrayal to self, or to a primary relationship. It emphasizes the tension between individualism and the commitments we make to others in loving relationships, hinting at the complexities of emotional fidelity in a self-centric culture.
In practice
This quote could be used in a relationship counseling session to discuss the importance of commitment.
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible - cowards and fools.
Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.
Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other's character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.
You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be.
Making the majors is not as hard as staying there, staying interested day after day. It's like being married. The hardest part is to stay married.
Despite the changes which come into our lives and with gratitude in our hearts, may we fill our days-as much as we can-with those things which matter most. May we cherish those we hold dear and express our love to them in word and in deed.
There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.
Guys are great before you know who they are,' said Lucy. 'They're great when you're still with who they might be.
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