The close affinity between sexual Eros and deceit is very startling - as in infatuation, infidelity and jealousy: " Quoniam lumbi mei repleti sunt il… - Ida Friederike Görres

I'm reading a biography of St John Baptist de la Salle - Extraordinary what educational insights and experiments have existed already - and what has been forgotten!. That reformatory, for instance, which he founded on the most amazing principles somewhere around 1680...The young delinquents were detained in solitary confinement to begin with, being promoted later..to community life..But in their single cells they were given flowers and plants to cultivate and singing birds to breed! The prisoners took their meals together with the Brothers, and each of the boys in solitary confinement was entrusted to one particular Brother...The Jansenists were bitter opponents of the Brothers, for in all his schools de la Salle laid great stress on frequent Communion..They did their best to oppose him personally and to hinder his work. The French Revolution wrecked his Institute, some of the Brothers were executed, others emigrated.

We're always being told that the Fall had nothing whatever to do with sex. No, I can't believe this any more...Not that procreation, as such, would never have been without the Fall. That's nonsense, to my mind; but somehow or other it would have been different...If it's true that St Thomas held other and more optimistic views on this subject, this doesn't disconcert me one bit. Maybe an angel-type, as he was, endowed with the charism of virginity, would be incapable of realizing the depth of the Fall in this domain. What is always attributed to the latent Manicheism in St Augustine might well be the realism of experience.

Goethe, whose letters I've been reading very intensively during the past few weeks, is always stressing Verträglichkeit - agreeing to live and let live - as the most important element of friendship: we shouldn't try to change people, but simply let them be as they are, making the best of even partial concord, instead of trying to force a fictitious perfect harmony.