Brad Miner

A friend in Christ recently sent me a piece on romance written by Brad Miner.

Restraint is anathema, and with Edmund Burke we may lament that, not only is chivalry dead. Romance is moribund as well:

It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly.

So wrote Burke in 1790.

This guy is quite the romantic. In another piece by Miner, In Praise of Sprezzatura he writes about intimacy.

It is spectacular.

The self can neither be lost nor found; isn’t some sort of psychic unicorn. It’s a creative process, perhaps the creative process, and the development of character — even the enjoyment of sex, Miller’s obsession — depends as much upon restraint as upon spontaneity. Without doubt we may learn something important in the surrender to sexual passion. But, among some men anyway, sex without self-control is just premature ejaculation, and plenty of men and women cultivate lifestyles characterized by self-indulgence. We live in an Age of Premature Ejaculation (APE), an awkward period of spontaneous, ill-considered, naked spouting off. We live among the APEs....

Nothing — and I mean nothing — is more destructive of civility than notions of instant intimacy: the way we immediately address one another by our first names; the way we share intimate facts about our lives with strangers; the way some clothing displays nudity.

The handshake developed as a way strangers could show themselves unarmed. It was a sensible and cautious first step towards friendship. We do well to remember that intimacy must be a process, a negotiation, and that who meets a stranger and jumps quickly into bed, so to speak, has a better than even chance of waking up next to an enemy.

Hope your weekend was a glorious one!