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Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on March 5, 2009
Literary Imagination 2009 11(2):192-204; doi:10.1093/litimag/imp002
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Love is Strange: Auden, Arendt, and Anatheism

Kascha Semonovitch*

*E-mail: ms.kascha@gmail.com

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Once upon a time, W. H. Auden asked Hannah Arendt to marry him.1 That is how I will tell the story. (Telling it as a story is important.)2 She said no. She and Auden had met, as she later said, "at an age when the easy knowledgeable intimacy of friendships concluded in one's youth can no longer be attained .... Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends."3 Despite his overhasty proposal, Auden himself was a great lover of divisions, rules, and regulations, delimitations between the public and the private, the sacred and the profane. Or as he put it, he was "So obsessive a ritualist/a pleasant surprise/makes him cross."4

Auden and Arendt's love story is not an intimate one, yet they shared a commitment to love both personally and conceptually. This love was performed not only in their private conversations and letters (of which there are many) . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Intimacy, Rituals, and Friendship
 

   "Self" in Loving One's Neighbor as One's Self
 

   "Neighbor" in Loving One's Neighbor as One's Self: Self as Other
 

   "Love" in Loving One's Neighbor as One's Self
 

   Loving the Neighbor—Love in the World
 

   Love is Strange
 

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