“Life is too short to have time for both love and art.”
“I don’t need love. I don’t have time for love. It’s a weakness of human nature…I only know lust. It’s normal and healthy.
Anyone who has experienced unrequited love and has inevitably tasted its bitter fruits will probably feel that “love is a disease” is really a wise saying. Isn’t it right? It’s so intoxicated, so obsessed, that it’s too painful until it reaches it, and it’s boring when it reaches it. However, when this sentence comes out of the patient’s mouth, it means something different from that from the doctor’s mouth.
Somerset Maugham used the eyes of a doctor to diagnose love, the most blind and insane behavior of mankind. Can the doctor not get sick? Maybe he nearly died from the disease in his early years, I don’t know. All I know is that in all his novels I have read, they show us this disease on the human body without revealing anything, and show us the catalyst for the disease of love – those beautiful, charming, Flattering women – anatomy for us.
Both love and art are rooted in human sexual instinct.
Somerset Maugham himself said: “I think art is also an expression of sexual instinct. A beautiful woman, the bay of Naples under the golden moon, or Titian’s famous painting “The Crypt” evokes the same feeling in people’s hearts .”
“Originally from the same root, why is it too urgent to fry each other?” Since love and art come from the same source, why does Strickland regard them as incompatible, and insist on destroying love and expanding art? Maugham explained: “It’s quite possible that Strickland hates expressing his feelings through sex (which is quite normal) because he feels it is rude compared to the self-gratification through artistic creation.” , isn’t the sex act that erases the color of love more brutish?
If sexuality is animal and art is divinity, then love happens to be in between, it is a mixture of animal and divinity—humanity. In order to make the distinction between the bestial and the divine, Strickland severed the tie that connected the two.
Maybe Strickland has a point. Love, as a mixture of bestiality and divinity, is inherently tragic. Animal nature drives man to seek the satisfaction of carnal desires, divinity drives man to search for flawless and holy beauty, and love tries to unite the two in one specific opposite sex. How unreliable is this unity.
Because of the animal nature contained in itself, love must arouse a crazy possessiveness, which takes a finite object as an end in itself. Because of the divinity contained in itself, love tries to achieve infinite beauty-perfection in this finite object.
How many hallucinations and delusions have been caused by this inner contradiction contained in love, and how many tragedies of abandonment and abandonment have been directed in real life. Strickland, then, may be right when he sees women not as ends in themselves, but only as means.
Love requires a person to take the object of the opposite sex he loves as an end in itself, otherwise it is not called love. Strickland sees women as tools of lust on the one hand and tools of art on the other (“Her body is so beautiful that I need to paint a nude. When I’m done painting, I don’t have any interest in her anymore”), but I don’t treat her as an end – I don’t treat her as an object of love.
In short, according to Strickland, the nature of genius cannot have such a weakness as love, and women are at best a sacrifice on the sacred altar of genius. Women are mud ponds for geniuses to roll in when lustful, throwing off their bodies, and thus become surprisingly clean, inviting to swim freely and easily over the nine heavens to touch beautiful entit.