Sunday, January 07, 2007

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.

from THE PASSION by Jeanette Winterson

1 comment:

Elliot said...

Ha! True.

That's probably a good argument for the fact that humans are more than just simple animals... our complexity ensures that when lovers should be getting down to the business of mating, we're often wrapped up with nervousness, hesitation, tiredness, illness, questions of morality, shyness, other concerns, etc. All very strange and evolutionarily inefficient if you think of humans as just being breeding machines, but more understandable if you view us as complicated thinking beings who are not ruled only by our most basic passions.