Affection

It is well past midnight. I am sitting in front of my computer typing this wearing nothing but white, ankle high socks and dark grey boxers. I have a tall, cold glass of Coke sitting on the desk near me. I wish it were Diet Coke but am still glad to have what I've got. I am listening to Elvis Presley and reading C. S. Lewis. The world is now well. All is as it should be and I could not be happier. Or could I? If I put a certain amount of effort into thinking about this last question I am sure I could come up with reasons that might make me happier but I don't want to waste my effort on that. I would rather enjoy the complacency of my idle contentment and just share what I have read by Lewis. The following excerpt is drawn from the Affection chapter of his book, The Four Loves. I have underscored the most important thoughts.

We may say, and not quite untruly, that we have chosen our friends and the woman we love for their various excellences - for beauty, frankness, goodness of heart, wit, intelligence, or what not. But it had to be the particular kind of wit, the particular kind of beauty, the particular kind of goodness that we like, and we have personal tastes in these matters. That is why friends and lover feel they were "made for one another." The special glory of Affection is that it can unite those who most emphatically, even comically, are not; people who, if they had not found themselves put down by fate in the same household or community, would have had nothing to do with each other. If Affection grows out of this - of course it often does not - their eyes begin to open. Growing fond of "old so-and-so," at first simply because he happens to be there, I presently begin to see that there is "something in him" after all. The moment when one first says, really meaning it, that though he is not "my sort of man" he is a very good man "in his own way" is one of liberation. It does not feel like that; we may feel only tolerant and indulgent. But really we have crossed a frontier. That "in his own way" means that we are getting beyond our own idiosyncrasies, that we are learning to appreciate goodness or intelligence in themselves, not merely goodness or intelligence flavoured and served to suit our own palate.