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.
Iβve built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself
He had learned long ago that, in general, the easier it was for anxious patients to reach him, the less likely they were to call. (107)
She was not crying Which surprised me very much But I understand now That she had found places For her melancholy That were behind more masks Than only her eyes
Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.
Every black American is bilingual. All of them. We speak street vernacular and we speak 'job interview.'
Ive lived and worked in developing countries so Im particularly interested in helping women in oppressive societies. Our problems can pale in comparison to theirs, the more we can do to empower them, the better off all women will be.
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