La Rochefoucauld: The Constant Inconstancy Of Love...

" I will love you forever," swears the poet. I find this easy to to swear. " I will love you at 4:15 p.m. next Tuesday": Is that still as easy?" -W.H. Auden, (1959).

"It is difficult to define love. What can be said is that in the soul it is a passion to dominate another, in the mind it is mutual understanding, whilst in the body it is simply a delicately veiled desire to posses the beloved after many rites and mysteries.

If pure love exists, free from the dross of our other passions, it lies hidden in the depths of our hearts unknown even to ourselves.

Where love is, no disguise can hide it for long; where it is not, none can simulate it.

There are few people who, when their love for each other is dead, are not ashamed of that love.

You can find women who have never had a love affair, but seldom women who had only one.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand copies, all different.

Love, like fire, cannot survive without continual movement, and it ceases to live as soon as it ceases to hope or fear.

True love is like ghostly apparitions: everybody talks about them but few have ever seen one.

Love lends its name to countless dealings which are attributed to it but of which it knows no more than the doge knows what goes on in Venice.

We cannot love anything except in terms of ourselves, and when we put out friends above ourselves we are only concerned with our own taste and pleasure. Yet it is only through such preference that friendship can be true and perfect.

Constancy in love is perpetual inconstancy, inasmuch as the heart is drawn to one quality after another in the beloved, now preferring this, now that. Constancy is therefore inconstancy held in check and confined to the same object.

Constancy in love is of two kinds: one comes from continually finding new things to love in the beloved, and the other from making it a point of honor to remain constant.

We are nearer to loving those who hate us than loving those who love us more than we want."

-Francois VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld: (1613-80. Together with La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld is the best-known of the French moralistes, famous for his exploration of the role of ‘amour-propre’ in human behavior. The Maximes are concise, often epigrammatic, reflections on human nature, typically written from a disillusioned or cynical point of view. One of La Rochefoucauld's favorite categories is that of ‘amour propre’, whose workings can be detected across large tracts of human life. -The Philosophy Dictionary. Text: "Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes Morales" Paris, 1665. Image: "The Lovers," Rene Magritte, 1928).

HISTORY: Celebrity Body Snatching: Charlie Chaplin's Stolen Body Found...

"The coffin containing the body of Charlie Chaplin - missing since his grave was robbed 11 weeks ago - has been found. It was dug up from a field about a mile away from the Chaplin home in Corsier near Lausanne, Switzerland. The legendary comedian died on Christmas Day last year, aged 88. He was buried two days later in the village of Corsier in the hills above Lake Geneva.

"Charlie would have thought it ridiculous."
-Lady Oona Chaplin

Swiss police have arrested two men - a Pole aged 24 and a Bulgarian aged 38 - and say they have confessed to stealing the coffin and reburying it. Names of the accused have not been released, but police say they are both motor mechanics. They were traced after police kept a watch on 200 phone kiosks and tapped the Chaplins' phone after the family received ransom demands of £400,000 for return of the body after it went missing in March. Sir Charles' 51-year-old widow, Lady Oona Chaplin, refused to pay up saying: "Charlie would have thought it ridiculous." In further calls the kidnappers made threats to harm her two youngest children.

The family kept silent about the ransom demands and various rumours circulated about the missing coffin. One Hollywood report suggested it had been dug up because Sir Charles was a Jew buried in a gentile cemetery. Lady Chaplin, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill inherited about £12m after the death of her husband. The couple and their eight children have been living in Lausanne since 1952. A spokesman for the Chaplins said: "The family is very happy and relieved that this ordeal is over." Superintendent Gabriel Cettou, the head of the Geneva police, said the two men would be charged with attempted extortion and disturbing the peace of the dead.

-BBC News (On This Day, 5.17.1978. Image: Charlie Chaplin's Exhumed Coffin, 1978).

Hitchcock: We All Go A Little Mad Sometimes...

"Norman Bates: She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?

Marion Crane: Yes. Sometimes just one time can be enough.

Norman Bates: You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.

Marion Crane: Sometimes, we deliberately step into those traps.

Norman Bates: I was born into mine. I don't mind it anymore.

Marion Crane: Oh, but you should. You should mind it.

Norman Bates: Oh, I do

Norman Bates: but I say I don't."

********************************************************

"Norman Bates: Mother! Oh God, Mother! Blood! Blood!"

-Joseph Stefano (PSYCHO, 1960)

"Of all his movies, Hitchcock took the most pride in Psycho, because with this one he was able to create a blockbuster through what he called,"pure film". Made for a cheap-even-at-the-time 800K, Psycho somehow keeps the audience tagging along despite its dearth of likable characters, its homely and oddly shaped story, and its lack of A-list sheen that typified the films Hitchcock had make with Grace Kelly, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. For once the star of the show was Hitchcock himself. "I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion." It wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance...They were aroused by pure film...It's the kind of picture where the camera takes over. Like Edgar Allan Poe, whom he revered as a young man, Hitchcock gave ordered shape to the thick mental glop of his own neurosis and obsessions."

-Jim Windolf (EXCERPT: Vanity Fair, March 2008)