GGSurvivor
kiwifarms.net
- Dołączono
- 4 Lut 2026
A translation I had found recently of the Romanian Historian of Religion, Mircea Eliade. I thought that it introduces a conception of women and man's relationship to them that isn't really talked about in gender discourse.
"In the epilogue from Pygmalion, Bernard Shaw suggests a very interesting explanation of the intellectual celibates. He says, specifically, that those certain men who had an educated, close and understanding mother present in their childhood and teenage years — very rarely fall into the traps of marriage. Because an educated mother immediately presupposes an interior with a composed taste, a selected inner life, permeated by sympathy, a harmonious education, without any pedagogy and without vulgar penalties. Developing in such a personalized and comfortable environment — the young man’s attention is brought upon a truly important problem: that of not confusing the woman with sex, the atmosphere of the feminine friendship with a genital-sentimental link, the way that most young men which didn’t have the luck of an educated mother and a harmonious and elevated homelife.
I don’t know if this observation applies just as well to Romanian society how, like Shaw says, it applies to the British one, but without a doubt it's just, both as an institution and as a line of reasoning.
Indeed, what young men expect, first of all, from young women they choose as life companions — is an emancipation from a tormented, stifling life, worn down by daily quarrels, of “scenes”, of life from the parental home. Most of them cannot emancipate themselves; that is to say, they can’t find the happiness and comfort they seek out in a perfect autonomy. They also confuse the sexual life with the comfortable, serene, camaraderie-like life — that they believe marriage will be. In reality, things work differently; a young man who doesn't know what the interior life means, that is, a young man that didn’t have an educated mother, doesn’t disassociate the noble sexual instinct —that demands a companion of pleasures — from the much more difficult instinct of interior harmony. Not knowing any other familial life but the one from home — he’s ready to embrace the young woman (who in reality is not ready to satisfy anything but his first and most fundamental instinct) and also take her as a colleague in the, much more refined, life of the interior.
With the happy young man, it happens differently. He, distinguishing his sexual needs from the needs of the harmony and camaraderie of marriage — remains celibate, allowing himself connections and adventures, but continuing to be independent in his home. He can’t be seduced just by any damsel’s charms, because he knows that behind the magnificence of her sexual life hides emptiness, inertia, opacity, turpitude. And a young man with a certain interior density never risks an entire life’s liberty and peace, for a simple sexual experience. Especially when the sweetness of time has removed a rigorous responsibility from such experiences.
What happens with the other young men is, in a certain sense, sad.These young men will always keep a confused attitude towards women,lacking perspectives and nuances. In a continuous conjugal availability ,they will see the women sexually and sentimentally, that is, possessively. I think it’d be difficult for them to meet a beautiful woman, without immediately having sexually oriented mental game — of imagination or of strategy. However many women they’d meet and have, they won't sense anything but a single feminine type (or a single facet): The Wife, the woman upon which he has equal rights over. A companion, a friend, a collaborator, a mistress, a master, or a schoolgirl (in love) — are inaccessible to him.
What makes a celibate firmly rise above the other men, is the fact he can directly and sincerely appreciate all the species of women and, especially, all ages. His sexual equilibrium being established one way or another, the celibate is free to befriend and profit spiritually from any feminine species. Youth, sex-appeal, beauty, luxury — are of no value for him. He numbers between the happy few which can taste the friendship of an ugly girl, the conversation of an old girl, the wisdom of a weathered woman and the fortifying optimism of a sixty year old woman. Over time, he comes to channel his sexual life so perfectly that his relationships with women no longer take account of certain superstitions that sexual tragedy has been preserving for so many thousands of years. He is truly a free man, with a balanced, healthy mental health, without repressions and without conflicts. Because the immense attraction towards women — which for most men is undifferentiated, acting as a whole, on all levels at once — in him is disassociated, distributed into numerous angles of perception. Men thatlive the women-sex confusion, are gnawed by eternal cravings ofpossession, restless and futile in their numerous experiences. For them, any woman evokes the sexual act — even if they like that woman most for her intelligence, or kindness, or her picturesqueness.
This confusion between sex and woman, evidently does not have its roots only in the absence or baseness of the familial life from childhood, as Shaw believes. It belongs to a certain vulgar-sentimental masculine structure. It’s common to both the peripheral type and the intellectualized type, who cannot get over a certain sentimental vulgarity in his relations with women (you know the chorus: eternal love, women are all the same, one single love, don’t trust women, go on and shove yourself in she likes it, etc.). Usually, these species of men are the only ones with firmly fixed ideas on women and love, that confess they know women and “philosophise” on women.
From this short synopsis, monovalent lovers, isolated characters, Dantesque figures, which seek out and live the absolute within a single love, must be excluded. Once, Christian marriage would give space to such connections — absolute, eternal, unique. The man and the woman were bound through a sacrament, in the virtue of a supernatural, durable union. For reasons so well known, today such relations have become a rarity. Around us we only encounter these two great classes: the married and the celibates, corresponding to the two vast and important structures."
Thoughts on the article? Is Eliade correct?
"In the epilogue from Pygmalion, Bernard Shaw suggests a very interesting explanation of the intellectual celibates. He says, specifically, that those certain men who had an educated, close and understanding mother present in their childhood and teenage years — very rarely fall into the traps of marriage. Because an educated mother immediately presupposes an interior with a composed taste, a selected inner life, permeated by sympathy, a harmonious education, without any pedagogy and without vulgar penalties. Developing in such a personalized and comfortable environment — the young man’s attention is brought upon a truly important problem: that of not confusing the woman with sex, the atmosphere of the feminine friendship with a genital-sentimental link, the way that most young men which didn’t have the luck of an educated mother and a harmonious and elevated homelife.
I don’t know if this observation applies just as well to Romanian society how, like Shaw says, it applies to the British one, but without a doubt it's just, both as an institution and as a line of reasoning.
Indeed, what young men expect, first of all, from young women they choose as life companions — is an emancipation from a tormented, stifling life, worn down by daily quarrels, of “scenes”, of life from the parental home. Most of them cannot emancipate themselves; that is to say, they can’t find the happiness and comfort they seek out in a perfect autonomy. They also confuse the sexual life with the comfortable, serene, camaraderie-like life — that they believe marriage will be. In reality, things work differently; a young man who doesn't know what the interior life means, that is, a young man that didn’t have an educated mother, doesn’t disassociate the noble sexual instinct —that demands a companion of pleasures — from the much more difficult instinct of interior harmony. Not knowing any other familial life but the one from home — he’s ready to embrace the young woman (who in reality is not ready to satisfy anything but his first and most fundamental instinct) and also take her as a colleague in the, much more refined, life of the interior.
With the happy young man, it happens differently. He, distinguishing his sexual needs from the needs of the harmony and camaraderie of marriage — remains celibate, allowing himself connections and adventures, but continuing to be independent in his home. He can’t be seduced just by any damsel’s charms, because he knows that behind the magnificence of her sexual life hides emptiness, inertia, opacity, turpitude. And a young man with a certain interior density never risks an entire life’s liberty and peace, for a simple sexual experience. Especially when the sweetness of time has removed a rigorous responsibility from such experiences.
What happens with the other young men is, in a certain sense, sad.These young men will always keep a confused attitude towards women,lacking perspectives and nuances. In a continuous conjugal availability ,they will see the women sexually and sentimentally, that is, possessively. I think it’d be difficult for them to meet a beautiful woman, without immediately having sexually oriented mental game — of imagination or of strategy. However many women they’d meet and have, they won't sense anything but a single feminine type (or a single facet): The Wife, the woman upon which he has equal rights over. A companion, a friend, a collaborator, a mistress, a master, or a schoolgirl (in love) — are inaccessible to him.
What makes a celibate firmly rise above the other men, is the fact he can directly and sincerely appreciate all the species of women and, especially, all ages. His sexual equilibrium being established one way or another, the celibate is free to befriend and profit spiritually from any feminine species. Youth, sex-appeal, beauty, luxury — are of no value for him. He numbers between the happy few which can taste the friendship of an ugly girl, the conversation of an old girl, the wisdom of a weathered woman and the fortifying optimism of a sixty year old woman. Over time, he comes to channel his sexual life so perfectly that his relationships with women no longer take account of certain superstitions that sexual tragedy has been preserving for so many thousands of years. He is truly a free man, with a balanced, healthy mental health, without repressions and without conflicts. Because the immense attraction towards women — which for most men is undifferentiated, acting as a whole, on all levels at once — in him is disassociated, distributed into numerous angles of perception. Men thatlive the women-sex confusion, are gnawed by eternal cravings ofpossession, restless and futile in their numerous experiences. For them, any woman evokes the sexual act — even if they like that woman most for her intelligence, or kindness, or her picturesqueness.
This confusion between sex and woman, evidently does not have its roots only in the absence or baseness of the familial life from childhood, as Shaw believes. It belongs to a certain vulgar-sentimental masculine structure. It’s common to both the peripheral type and the intellectualized type, who cannot get over a certain sentimental vulgarity in his relations with women (you know the chorus: eternal love, women are all the same, one single love, don’t trust women, go on and shove yourself in she likes it, etc.). Usually, these species of men are the only ones with firmly fixed ideas on women and love, that confess they know women and “philosophise” on women.
From this short synopsis, monovalent lovers, isolated characters, Dantesque figures, which seek out and live the absolute within a single love, must be excluded. Once, Christian marriage would give space to such connections — absolute, eternal, unique. The man and the woman were bound through a sacrament, in the virtue of a supernatural, durable union. For reasons so well known, today such relations have become a rarity. Around us we only encounter these two great classes: the married and the celibates, corresponding to the two vast and important structures."
Thoughts on the article? Is Eliade correct?
