Many Greek philosophers looked forward to old age, because &mdash they haplessly argued &mdash old age freed them from the slavery of love.
Euripides disagreed. More than 2,000 years ago he explained the great secret:
"When love is temperate it is the sweetest thing,
but save me from the other kind."
Happy Valentine's Day from EPW and Zorba Press.
And take a look at the Zorba Anthology of Love Stories.
Here, dear Reader, you will find a treasure of 31 stories (and passages from novels) all about the wild joys, the heartbreaking sorrows, the wonderful comedy, and the delightful mysteries of Love. Romantic love is the main theme of these tales, but other varieties of Love are explored: erotic love, motherly love, brotherly love, spiritual love, and friendship.
This book contains 28 selections by great storytellers from many lands, including Chekhov, Mansfield, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Mary Shelley, Tolstoy, Hesse, Yezierska, E. M. Forster, Selma Lagerlöf, Marguerite Audoux, Maupassant, Hawthorne, Melville, Casanova, and many more. Also included are an Introduction by the editor, and 3 original pieces by Charles Elliott, Michael Pastore, and the novelist O. Thoreau.
But why read about love, when you watch a film? ... One of the great comic love films of all time is Smiles Of A Summer Night, by Ingmar Bergman. A comedy, yes, but a drama as well, and filled with pointed insights about human relationships. This is one of the last films that Bergman made before his work -- still good, but very different -- plunged through a glass darkly, filled with shrieking women, weak-hearted men, and sexistential angst.
Thanks to the website Filmschatten, you can now see Bergman's film free: a broadband internet connection (cable or DSL) is needed.
Filmschatten website: http://filmschatten.blogspot.com/
Smiles of a Summer Night (part 1 of 7)
And did we mention, for the perfect gift for Valentine's Day, the Zorba Anthology of Love Stories ?