PHILOSOPHY & MUSES
“Yet so strong is the popular sense of the unworthiness and insignificance of things purely emotional, that those who have taken moral problems to heart and felt their dignity have often been led into attempts to discover some external right and beauty of which our moral and aesthetic feelings should be perceptions or discoveries, just as our intellectual activity is, a perception or discovery of external fact. These philosophers seem to feel that unless moral and aesthetic judgments are expressions of objective truth, and not merely expressions of human nature, they stand condemned of hopeless triviality. A judgment is not trivial, however, because it rests on human feelings; on the contrary, triviality consists in abstraction from human interests; only those judgments and opinions are truly insignificant which wander beyond the reach of verification, and have no function in the ordering and enriching of life.”
—George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory
“In a patriarchal society, masculine gender identity is often moulded by violently toxic stereotypes. A dominant, winning, oppressive masculinity model is imposed on babies at birth. Attitudes, languages and actions end up progressively conforming to a macho virility ideal that removes vulnerability and dependence. Any possible reference to femininity is aggressively banned, as it is considered a threat against the complete affirmation of a masculine prototype that allows no divergencies. There is nothing natural in this drift. The model is socially and culturally built to reject anything that doesn’t comply with it.
And this is has very seriously implications. Toxic masculinity, in fact, nourishes abuse, violence and sexism. And not only that. It condemns men themselves to conform to an imposed phallocratic virility in order to be socially accepted. In other words, toxic masculinity produces oppressors and victims the same time.
Therefore, it seems necessary to suggest a desertion away from patriarchal plans and uniforms. Deconstructing the idea of masculinity as it has been historically established. Opening a cage. Throwing a chant. It’s time to celebrate a man who is free to practice self-determination, without social constraints, without authoritarian sanctions, without suffocating stereotypes.
A man who is able to reconnect with his core of fragility, with his trembling and this tenderness. A man on his knees in front of surrender, who honors fear and its thorns. A man full of kindness and care. A man who leans on others, who burns up the myth of self-sufficiency. A man who is also a sister, mother, bride. A man swollen with disorder, who names blood’s ignition and nostalgia’s dismay. A man who completes the weaving of his own affectivities, opening himself to non hierarchical relations. A baby man, able to do bold and playful somersaults, who wonders in amazement when the world becomes new. A man pregnant with broken chains.
It’s not about suggesting a new normative model, rather to release what is constrained. Breaking a symbol order, which is nowadays useless. Nourishing a space of possibility where masculine can shake its toxicity off, to freely regain what was taken away. And, in doing this, turning back time, learning to unlearn.”
—Gucci, Fall Winter 2020, Men’s Collection
“The main thing that I want to say is that I don’t think women are at their most beautiful in their adolescence or in their early 20s."
— Nan Goldin
“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.”
— Joan Didion
“In one of his essays, Marías suggests that his work deals as much with what didn’t happen as with what happened. In other words, most of us believe we are who we are because of the decisions we’ve made, because of events that shaped us, because of the choices of those around us. We rarely consider the we’re also formed by the decisions we didn’t make, by events that could have happened but didn’t or by lack of choices, for that matter.”
— An Unnecessary Woman
"Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but current usage defines it as an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason."
— Sentimentality according to Wikipedia
“Feelings are not as old as time. Just as there was a first instant when someone rubbed two sticks together to make a spark, there was a first time joy was felt, and a first time for sadness. For a while, new feelings were being invented all the time. Desire was born early, as was regret. When stubbornness was felt for the first time, it started a chain reaction, creating the feeling of resentment on the one hand, and alienation and loneliness on the other. It might have been a certain counterclockwise movement of the hips that marked the birth of ecstasy; a bolt of lightning that caused the first feeling of awe. Or maybe it was the body of a girl named Alma. Contrary to logic, the feeling of surprise wasn’t born immediately. It only came after people had enough time to get used to things as they were. And when enough time had passed, and someone felt the first feeling of surprise, someone, somewhere else, felt the first pang of nostalgia.
It’s also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned. The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it– just to name– must have been like trying to catch something invisible.
(Then again, the oldest feeling in the world might simply have been confusion.) Having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how much it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions. It’s possible that this is how art was born. New kinds of joy were forged, along with new kinds of sadness: The eternal disappointment of life as it is; the relief of unexpected reprieve; the fear of dying.
Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom, or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges, and absorbs the impact.”
— The History of Love
“Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.”
— Diana Vreeland
To the Editor of the Daily Telegraph
Sir, Concerning the interesting article on men’s dress and the fashions for next season that appears in today’s issue of your paper, will you allow me to point out that the costume worn now by Mr. Wyndham London Assurance might be limits as the basis for a new departure, not in the style, but in the color of modern evening dress. The costume in question belongs to 1840 or 1841, and its charm resides in the fact that the choice of the color of the coat is left to the taste and fancy and inclination of the wearer. Freedom in such selection of color is a necessary condition of variety and individuality of costume, and the uniforms of black that is worn now, though valuable at the dinner-party, where it serves to isolate and separate women’s dresses, to frame them as it were, still is dull and tedious and depressing in itself, and makes the aspect of club-life and men’s dinners monotonous and uninteresting. The little note of individualism that makes delightful dress can only be attained nowadays by the color and treatment of the flower one wears. This is a great pity…
…The coat, then, of the next season, will be an exquisite color-note, and have also a great psychological value. It will emphasis the serious and thoughtful side of a man’s character. One will be able to discern a man’s views of life by the color he selects. The color of the coat will be symbolic. It will be part of the wonderful symbolic movement in the modern art. The imagination will concentrate itself on the waistcoat. Waistcoats will show whether a man can admire poetry or not. That will be very valuable. Over the shirt-front fancy will preside. By a single glance one will be able to detect the tedious.
— Oscar Wilde, February 2, 1891
