This game has no name.
from the book “Power” by Robert Green
“Absence diminishes minor passions and inflames great ones, as the wind douses a candle and fans a fire.” La Rochefoucauld, 1613 – 1680
[..] the truth of the law of absence and presence. At the start of an affair, you need to heighten your presence in the eyes of the other. If you absent yourself too early, you may be forgotten. But once your lover’s emotions are engaged, and the feeling of love has crystallized, absence inflames and excites. Giving no reason for your absence excites even more: The other person assumes he or she is at fault. While you are away, the lover’s imagination takes flight, and a stimulated imagination cannot help but make love grow stronger. […] What withdraws, what becomes scarce, suddenly seems to deserve our respect and honour. What stays too long, inundating us with its presence, makes us disdain it.
Everything in the world depends on absence and presence. A strong presence will draw power and attention to you – you shine more brightly than those around you. But a point is inevitably reached where too much presence creates the opposite effect: The more you are seen and heard from, the more your value degrades. You become a habit. No matter how hard you try to be different, subtly, without your knowing why, people respect you less and less. At the right moment you must learn to withdraw yourself before they unconsciously push you away. It is a game of hide-and-seek.
The truth of this law can most easily be appreciated in matters of love and seduction. In the beginning stages of an affair, the lover’s absence stimulates your imagination, forming a sort of aura around him or her. But this aura fades when you know too much – when your imagination no longer has room to roam. The loved one becomes a person like anyone else, a person whose presence is taken for granted. This is why the seventeenth-century French courtesan Ninon de Lenclos advised constant feints at withdrawal from one’s lover. “Love never dies of starvation,” she wrote, “but often of indigestion.”
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Posted on September 30th, 2009 under Chapters • Tags: absence, affair, imagination, love, power, presence, Quotes. •
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