A Natural History Of Love
Diane Ackerman
Language: English
Pages: 358
ISBN: 0679761837
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The bestselling author of A Natural History of the Senses now explores the allure of adultery, the appeal of aphrodisiacs, and the cult of the kiss. Enchantingly written and stunningly informed, this "audaciously brilliant romp through the world of romantic love" (Washington Post Book World) is the next best thing to love itself.
Wonderland, with her smocked European-style dress and long, beribboned yellow hair, but she spoke a number of African dialects and sat around tribal fires listening to the tales of the elders, while learning the survival skills of a young male warrior. Abandoned by her mother before she was five, she made a childhood career of being “best lad” in her father’s racing stable, subduing savage and unruly thoroughbreds. At sixteen, she married a local farmer twice her age. At eighteen, when her
bourgeois society, seem less craven when explained by love. Like truth, love is a rock-solid defense. Subconsciously, we picture love as a powerful geyser which builds up inside a person and has to vent its fury somewhere, be it for good or evil. We also realize that lovers need to prove their love, graphically, absolutely, with gestures that sometimes get out of hand and can become a soul-consuming end in themselves. We’re fascinated by passionate extremes and don’t always think they’re
Tabasco sauce passed as dinner, and there amid the ruckus of gritty dialect and workingman’s music they held their own impromptu symposium. No one described it as such, but when pensive young minds get together they’re often drawn to similar topics. Among those they discussed easily were nature versus nurture, aesthetic ideals, the purpose of love—without realizing it, they were talking Plato. “Which do you think is more important,” a young woman asked me that evening, “truth or beauty?” “No
arrive and begin boiling in the flesh, knows that it is the habit of the fly to leave the sound parts of an animal and rush to the festering wounds. I do not know why. When the phosphate ran out, the people of Makatéa fled to Tahiti, and took jobs in its factories, hotels, restaurants, and sin parlors. They left behind a small green gazebo of an island. The loading platform collapsed long ago, ravaged by the salty talons of tropic storms, and undone by time, that great mindless rearranger of
images of mares’ genitals sounds odd, remember that ancient Romans dressed their children in penis amulets to ward off evil spirits, and medieval churches displayed symbols of female genitals (called “sheela-na-gigs”) on their doorways for the same purpose. “Horseshoe” was a slang term for the female genitals in eighteenth-century Europe (a seduced girl was said to have “lost a horseshoe”). Horses have always tantalized a wild and ancient part of us that worshiped the White Mare, symbolized by