Best Of David Whyte's "The Three Marriages'
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self, and Relationship by David Whyte
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| Loïs Mailou Jones, Self Portrait, 1940 |
A real work cannot be balanced with a marriage in a strategic way, a little bit on that side, a little bit on the other; it can only be put in conversation with that marriage, as an equal partner. All the strategies for making them work together will come from understanding that central conversation.
p.80-81
Youthful innocence is, in effect, a way of paying a deep kind of attention to the world; a van Gogh-like courage, looking out at a potential canvas others have lost the ability to see. To lose your innocence is to rob yourself of a particular pair of eyes and a profoundly attentive set of ears.
p.92
The first step toward the self is the step discerning what questions are our own, and what questions are our own, and what questions we have been bullied into by others seemingly taller, more adult or more educated than we are.
p.94
There is no first step toward self-knowledge without hazard or risk to the surface self you already know. To begin with, the interior self is above all unknowable and untouchable.
p.98
Passionate love seems by its very nature to be a loss of context; it also seems to involve a necessary and helpless inability to save the one who is driven by it from what clearly lies ahead. It is in effect a form of unilateral disarmament.
p.107
The other interesting thing about a work life is how different it is from a workday. The tasks we face on a given day are often around specific actions, or specific conversations we need to undertake. The tasks we face in pursuing a work life more often have to do with intangibles, with what cannot yet be touched or spoken, and very often with the great intangibles of our unhappiness. In a good workday you are more often than not trying to make other people happy; in a good work life you are trying to make your self happy.
p.122-123
Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. Just as people lost in the wilderness, on a cliff face or in a blizzard pay attention with a kind of acuity that they would not have if they thought they knew where they were. Why? Because for those who are really lost, their life depends on paying real attention. If you think you know where you are, you stop looking.
p.144
A work is achieved not by creating a hermetic space sealed off from the world, but nel mezzo, in the middle of everything.
p.152
In building a work life, people who follow rules, written or unwritten, too closely and in an unimaginative way are often suffocated by those same rules and die by them, quite often unnoticed and very often unmourned.
p.153
Stopping can be very, very difficult. It can take exhaustion, extreme circumstances on a wet, snowy mountain ridge or an intimate sense of loss for it to happen. Even then we can soon neutralize and isolate the experience, dismissing it as illogical, pretending it didn't count, then turning back to our surface strengths and chattering away in a false language we have built around our successes.
p.170
"[...] the fact that real courage always takes the form of particularities."
p.191
[Robert Louis] Stevenson asks us not to rage against our fate but to look at the tidal flow of events surrounding us with a keen eye. Only those who put more energy into self-pity than into paying attention are truly marooned.
p.209
His [Robert Louis Stevenson] lack of subterfuge is indicative of an admirable sense of integrity
p.211
To dare everything is not necessarily to travel off, but often the opposite, to have faith in a foundation you have discovered in life and which, though it is difficult to describe, even to yourself, you refuse to relinquish
p.212
Though we must live according to the nature of our times, the death of our hopes in one marriage may lead us to live out those same hopes with other imaginative vows. We do not know in our youth which marriages we are destined to live out literally and which we are meant to hold in a different, more allegorical way. We must find out as we mature the marriage we are able to bring to life physically or imaginatively.
p.235
The fragile surface self begins to fragment and to slough off like an outer skin. The newly emerging larger identity not yet here but the old is not yet gone. In self-exploration we can find ourselves in stages where we approximate tho a gangly adolescent who suddenly doesn't' like anything or anyone, including themselves. It is a concentrated bitterness that medieval Christian monks described with the Greek-derived word accidie.
p.256
The interesting think about a marriage is that the ways in which we are alike can be just as difficult for us as the ways in which we differ.
p.275
It might be a central discipline of relationship for the couple to cyclically help each other through window of freedom no matter where they are in the chronology of family life. The understanding that we are not the be-all and end-all for our partners, nor should we be, helps us to grant ourselves and the other person freedom now rather than later. In giving away the personal conceit of wanting to be the entire source of their happiness, we give them away generously in the process. In the great Murphy's Law of Relationship, we then find that we have more of them present; actually enjoying our company, that they volunteer to stay with us exactly because we have tried, against a natural selfish undertow, to give them a sense of choice.
p.279-280
What is needed in a marriage with the self is what is needed in the marriage to another: the radical letting alone of our partner, the deeper self, to let it live its own life without our necessity for a constant, overarching control. We must stop trying to protect that deeper, more vulnerable self from the way it feels things keenly and at their essence.
p.338-339
Being enlightened does not mean we assume supernatural powers or find a perfection that exalts us above the daily losses other human beings are subject to; enlightenment means we have accepted thoroughly our transience, our vulnerability and our imperfections and live just as robustly with them as without them.
p.340
Doing something innocent, dangerous and wonderful all at the same time may be the perfect metaphor for understanding one of the demands made by a marriage of marriages: the need to live in multiple contexts, multiple layers and with multiple people all at the same time without choosing between them. A kind of spiritual and imaginative multitasking but in which we attempt to be present to everything that is occurring, to have a foundation that will hold them all and not be distracted by passing details.
p.352
More on Whyte's writing on the yak occidental
Poetry in the Workplace: Review of David Whyte's "Crossing the Unknown Sea"
