With a concept of justice in hand, we step back to consider suffering, the bane of our existence as living beings. We have identified our aim, to seek, promote and realize the well-being of living beings. Yet suffering persists, and characterizes much of the human condition. Our understanding of it is an important weapon in our struggle against it. As…
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Value for Monday of Week 38 in the season of Fulfillment
Being Passionate
Passion is the power behind Love.
- My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style. [attributed to Maya Angelou]
- If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins. [Benjamin Franklin]
- Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged. [Samuel Johnson]
A sweet Athenian lady is in love
With a disdainful youth: anoint his eyes;
But do it when the next thing he espies
May be the lady . . .
[William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Act II, Scene 1.]
The elixir of love can drive us to actions that are heroic or consummately foolish. A person who is driven by passion may find that it consumes everything else.Some people do not easily feel passion. Passion is risky, and so some people avoid it. Some religions so advise. Ours does not. We believe that living a fulfilling and productive life requires us to take risks.
We are wise, of course, if we put passion in its place and in its perspective, and use it for the good. Passion can be conducive to psychological well-being. It can play a salutary role in academic studies, self-growth, creativity, and leadership. However: “Harmonious passion originates from an autonomous internalisation of the activity in identity and leads people to choose to engage in the activity that they love. It is expected to mainly lead to more adaptive outcomes. Conversely, obsessive passion originates from a controlled internalisation in identity and leads people to experience an uncontrollable urge to engage in the activity.”
By living in a supportive community and remaining mindful of our responsibilities in relationship to others, and ourselves, we can channel our passions in positive directions so they serve the good. We can also live a love-filled life.
Real
True Narratives
Book narratives:
- Brian Douthit and David Robertson, eds., Eyes of the Poet: Love and Passion in Lasting Splendor (Lulu Press, 2006).
- Carol Lansing, Passion and Order: Restraint of Grief in the Medieval Italian Communes (Cornell University Press, 2007).
- William R. Jankowiak, Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? (Columbia University Press, 1995).
- Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2001).
- Judith Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 1992).
- Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Indiana University Press, 1996).
- Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Narratives (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
- Carolyn Burke, No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), on the singer who “poured her life’s passion into her music”.
- Steven Naifeh & Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life (Random House, 2011): Vincent van Gogh’s intensely passionate inner life jumps off the canvas into the consciousness of any astute observer of his paintings, and the reader of his letters. Rich in color and texture, his paintings practically overload the senses: such seems to have been the artist’s experience of life. “. . . it’s better that we feel something for each other rather than behave like corpses towards one another . . . When one lives with others and is bound by a feeling of affection one is aware that one has a reason for being, that one might not be entirely worthless and superfluous but perhaps good for one thing or another, considering that we need one another and are making the same journey as travelling companions.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
- Richard S. Lazarus and Bernice N. Lazarus, Passion and Reason: Making Sense of Our Emotions (Oxford University Press, 1994).
- Virginia Burrus, Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline (Fordham University Press, 2006).
- Niklas Luhman, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (Stanford University Press, 1998).
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
The glance of women resembles certain combinations of wheels, which are tranquil in appearance yet formidable. You pass close to them every day, peaceably and with impunity, and without a suspicion of anything. A moment arrives when you forget that the thing is there. You go and come, dream, speak, laugh. All at once you feel yourself clutched; all is over. The wheels hold you fast, the glance has ensnared you. It has caught you, no matter where or how, by some portion of your thought which was fluttering loose, by some distraction which had attacked you. You are lost. The whole of you passes into it. A chain of mysterious forces takes possession of you. You struggle in vain; no more human succor is possible. You go on falling from gearing to gearing, from agony to agony, from torture to torture, you, your mind, your fortune, your future, your soul; and, according to whether you are in the power of a wicked creature, or of a noble heart, you will not escape from this terrifying machine otherwise than disfigured with shame, or transfigured by passion. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume III – Marius; Book Sixth – The Conjunction of Two Stars, Chapter VI, “Taken Prisoner”.]
That dance was an intoxication to her. After the first few steps, she felt herself slipping away from herself. She almost knew she was going, she did not even want to go. Yet she must have chosen to go. She lay in the arm of the steady, close man with whom she was dancing, and she seemed to swim away out of contact with the room, into him. She had passed into another, denser element of him, an essential privacy. The room was all vague around her, like an atmosphere, like under sea, with a flow of ghostly, dumb movements. But she herself was held real against her partner, and it seemed she was connected with him, as if the movements of his body and limbs were her own movements, yet not her own movements--and oh, delicious! [D.H. Lawrence, “The White Stocking” (1914).]
Some human beings are never young . . . and they never grow up. They lead absolutely colourless lives. They are--they are etiolated. They never love, and never feel the loss of it. They are--for the moment I can think of no better image--they are human flower-pots, in which no soul has been planted. But a human soul properly growing must begin in a fresh childishness. [H.G. Wells, “In the Modern Vein: An Unsympathetic Love Story” (1894).]
Novels and stories:
- Nicole Krauss, Great House: A Novel (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010) (emotional intensity).
- William Kennedy, Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (Viking, 2011): “a polyrhythmic contemplation of time and its effects on passion set in three different eras . . .”
- Martin Walser, A Man in Love: A Novel (Arcade, 2019): “. . . a version of the story that made Goethe famous . . . of the sorrowful young artist Werther’s unrequited infatuation with a young woman called Lotte.”
- Akil Kumarasamy, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022): “Following a cohort of young female medical students in the late 1990s, this narrative-within-a-narrative becomes our secret hatch door into the vortex of girlhood, its 'walls held together by the spit of longing.'”
- Sally Rooney, Intermezzo: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024): “Rooney’s writing about love hits as hard as it does because she is especially adept at evoking loneliness, for which love is a salve. There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea.”
Poetry
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
[Pablo Neruda, “If You Forget Me”]
Other poems:
- Pablo Neruda, “I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You”
- Pablo Neruda, “In the wave-strike over unquiet stones”
- Pablo Neruda, “Absence”
- Pablo Neruda, “Drunk as Drunk”
- Pablo Neruda, “In my sky at twilight”
- Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee”
- James Joyce, “Of That So Sweet Imprisonment”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Vladimir Howowitz was a classical pianist who played with perhaps unequaled romantic passion. Fellow pianist Rudolf Serkin said of him: “The white heat of his playing, the fire and passion were incredible, and my hair stood on end.” Of his playing, conductor David Michael Wolff wrote: “From the first crashing, cascading arpeggio followed by electric, deeply penetrating chords full of passion and sheer color, I knew that I was hearing absolute mastery and artistry. Others have said it before – The first time I heard Horowitz, it’s as if I were hearing the piano for the first time, as if my ears never had never known what the piano was capable of…” One reviewer writes: “His coolness and implacability onstage masked a bone-deep passion and sensitivity.” Here is a link to his playlists.
Violinist Bronisław Huberman was known for his passionate playing. Edmondo De Amicis wrote: “I watched you intensely when you played. I saw when your eyes sparkled and when they grew moist, and I saw the shiver running through the muscles of your pale face. Sometimes, when you pressed the violin, you seemed to press a living and adored thing, which inebriated and tormented you; and when you took it from the shoulder, you made a movement as if you were tearing off a vampire sugging [sic.] your blood; and then you took it back to your breast and re-embraced it with even more passionate love and pressed it under your chin with the tenderness of a mother who presses her face against the face of her creature.” His passion extended beyond music, of course: “Having witnessed the First World War, Huberman was a passionate ‘Pan-European' believing a united Europe as the solution to avoid future catastrophes. He even wrote a book about his ideas.” Károly Flesch wrote: “His personality is self-willed, sensitive, nervous and excitable, passionate and self-assured. It does not tolerate contradiction and demands subordination, even of the music.” A biography is titled: “Bronislaw Huberman, or the Passions and Emotions of the Forgotten Genius”. Here is a link to his playlists.
Yevgeny Mravinsky was a conductor known for his intensity and passion. “He was . . . a very exciting conductor, frequently changing tempo in order to heighten the musical effect for which he was striving, often making prominent use of brass instrumentation.” His performances were “technically precise, finely detailed, subtly colored, and highly dramatic -- and this not always because he was in the habit of whipping fast finales into a frenzy. His readings had an intensity, concentration, and -- despite the arduous rehearsal -- spontaneity . . .” This is true of his highly respected recordings of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which are “of the utmost intensity; no one else has had the nerve, or ability, to play the music this way. The treatment is very Russian: the passions more feverish, the melancholy darker, the climaxes louder.” Here is a link to his playlists, a documentary film, and a video of him conducting Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. His wooden appearance hides the intensity that the orchestra members and keen listeners knew well.
Conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos was also known for his intense passion. “His conducting style was passionate, highly-charged and demonstrative; he had a phenomenal memory and rarely used a baton. The American composer and music critic Virgil Thomson once described him as 'oversensitive, overweening, over brutal, over intelligent, underconfident and wholly without ease....His personal excitement borders on hysteria and he distorted music with nervous passion.'” Here are links to his playlists, and of him conducting live.
Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875) (approx. 130-136’) (list of recorded performances) is the quintessential opera of hot-blooded romance. The male protagonist’s mother advises him to choose a nice girl from the village but of course, he plunges headlong into the abyss with the hot-headed seductress. “Bizet’s Carmen has everything you want from an opera: high drama, passionate characters, a love story.” “Carmen musically portrays gypsy life with its exotic depictions and chromatic elements. The plot line, tonality, and character representation reflect the power struggle and political tension of nineteenth-century France. The opera also highlights the struggle between the dominant male figure and the femme fatale.” “The vehicle for Bizet's realization of his ideals turned out to be a 1845 novella by Prosper Mérimée, Prosper Merimee Prosper Mérimée narrated by a French archeologist in Andalusia to whom Don José Navarro, a notorious brigand awaiting his execution, relates the tale of his fatal encounter with the gypsy Carmencita.” Video-recorded performances include those featuring Parlov & Agulló (Casero); and Migenes-Johnson & Domingo. Top audio-only-recorded performances feature Michel & Jobin (Cluytens) in 1950; de Los Angeles & Gedda (Beecham) in 1957; Price & Corelli (Karajan) in 1963; Verrett & Lance (Prêtre) in 1967; Troyanos & Domingo (Solti) in 1975; Berganza & Domingo (Abbado) in 1978 (Part 1; Part 2); and Gheorghiu & Alagna (Plasson) in 2003.
Along similar lines as Carmen is Ruggiero Leoncavallo, Zingari (Gypsies) (1912) (approx. 64’) (list of recorded performances), an opera “of passion, jealousy and crime”, based on a poem by Alexander Pushkin. Carlo Rizzi conducted a recorded performance.
Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57, “Appassionata” (1805) (approx. 24-26’) (list of recorded performances), “is filled with volatile mood shifts, turbulent drama, and revolutionary fire.”
Manuel de Falla, El Amor Brujo (Love the Magician, or the Bewitched Love) (1915) (approx. 34-40’) (list of recorded performances), “is a ballet-pantomime in one act based on a story concerned with love, death, exorcism, and release. The story concerns two gypsies, the sensual Candela and the handsome Carmelo.” “The plot is disarmingly simple – a gypsy is possessed by the ghost of her faithless former lover until her new suitor enlists a beautiful friend to entice it away. Every one of the thirteen scenes evokes a diverse mood that is seamlessly integrated into a moving tapestry of enthralling but restrained human feeling.” “Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo, or Love, the Magician, is a ballet but not in the traditional sense. It uses flamenco steps instead of classical ballet, contains songs for a mezzo-soprano soloist, and the original version included dialogue which was later removed.” Top performances of the ballet version (approx. 98-99’) feature dancers Antonio Gades in 1967; and Antonio Gades and Christine Hoyos in 1986. Top recorded performances of the orchestral version are conducted by Reiner in 1946, Ansermet in 1955, Argenta in 1957, Stokowski in 1960, Stokowski in 1964, Dutoit in 1981, and Heras-Casado in 2019. Heisser performed the work arranged for piano.
Two works by de Falla are on amore and jealousy, one light-hearted [El Sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) (1919) (approx. 39-43’) (list of recorded performances)], the other darker [Noches en los Jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain) for piano & orchestra, G 49 (1916) (approx. 25’) (list of recorded performances).
Heinrich Schütz, Dafne (1627) (approx. 75’): “In a prologue set in the Elysian Fields, Ovid proclaims the cruelty and intensity of love. The ensuing drama presents Venus and Cupid (described as the ‘little archer’, a pun on ‘Schütze’) punishing the boastful Apollo so that he becomes enamoured with the uninterested nymph Daphne, who escapes the god’s rapacious clutches by metamorphosing into a laurel.” “. . . so obvious and compelling is the sense of empathy in the music that one might almost be tempted to wonder how well the tensions and transformations of Ovid’s myth suited what was presumably the happy occasion of the wedding at all.”
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake, Op. 20, TH 12 (1876) (approx. 140-145’) (synopsis) (recordings), expresses how passion can captivate and disable us. “. . . most of the music in Swan Lake conveys the despair of the Swan Queen, Odette, the impetuous love of Prince Siegfried, and the cruelty of Baron Von Rothbart.” Here are links to recordings of the ballet with video, at Kirov Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre. Top audio-recorded performances are conducted by Rozhdestvensky in 1969, Bonynge in 1977, Ozawa in 1979, and Neeme Järvi in 2013.
Other compositions:
- Gabriel Fauré, La Bonne Chanson, Op. 61 (1894) (approx. 22’) (list of recorded performances), “was composed between 1892 and 1894, while Fauré was having an affair with an amateur singer, Emma Bardac”, “who would later marry Claude Debussy . . .”
- Antonín Dvořák, Othello Overture, Op. 93, B. 174 (1892) (approx. 13-15’) (list of recorded performances)
- William Henry Fry, The Breaking Heart (approx. 11’)
- Arnold Bax, Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra (1918) (approx. 46’): “Few musical works brood so intensively over so little material, and its moments of vision emerge out of an almost obsessive uniformity of mood which can make it as exhausting an experience for the listener as for the soloist, scarcely rested during the work’s fifty minutes’ course. The matter, of course, is romantic love—or, depending on the armour-plating of your sympathies, sexual infatuation. Reflexive, subjective and personal, it is at the very least a remarkably public declaration of a private passion.”
- George Frideric Händel, Aminta e Fillide (Amyntas and Phyllis), HWV 83 (1708) (approx. 51’) (libretto) (list of recorded performances): “The line of argument by which Amyntas wins his suit is rather esoteric, but we are dealing in the conventions of an ideal world where constancy and fidelity eventually melt the ‘cruel heart’ of the lady.”
- Friedrich Gernsheim, Introduction & Allegro appassionato, Op. 38 (1879) (approx. 11’)
- Pēteris Vasks, Musica Appassionata, for string orchestra (2002) (approx. 18’)
- André Messager, Passionnément (1926) (approx. 77’) is an operetta involving passions for alcohol and amore. Stefan Blunier has conducted an excellent performance.
- Enric Casals, Cello Concerto in F Major, “In Romantic Serious Style” (1946) (approx. 32’).
- Robert Schumann, Piano Sonata No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22 (1838) (approx. 17-19’) (recordings) “is an impetuous, passionate work, with moments of melting melodic contrast.” “It is a work of great sweep and passion, typically combining dramatic urgency with moments of rapt tenderness.”
- Arno Babadjanian, Piano Trio in F-Sharp minor (1952) (approx. 24-25’) is “passionate and full of memorable melodies with wonderful writing for all three instruments.” It “plumbs the depths of the human psyche in music that is – by turns – full of dark menace, sweet romance, soulful reflection, searing drama and lush harmonic beauty.”
Indian and Pakistani ghazals:
- Sung by Jagjit Singh
- Jagjit Singh live at Sydney Opera House
- Sung by Gulam Ali
- Sung by Mirza Ghalib
- Sung by Mehdi Hassan
- Sung by Chitra Singh
- Sung by Iqbal Bano
Albums:
- John-Henry Crawford, “Corazón” (2022) (63’): Crawford’s cello pairs mainly with guitar and piano.
- Geoff Eales, “Love Sacred & Profane” (2022) (57’), is “a genre-busting tour-de-force that reflects on the enigma of love with all its complications and contradictions.” “You have to love Geoff Eales, not simply for his fabulous keys and compositional skills but the utter passion of his vision. Love Sacred and Profane is his masterwork, referencing every thing from Debussy to Purim-era Return to Forever, showtime balladry to the works of another musical visionary, Hildegard von Bingen, the Sybil of the Rhine.”
- Ziya Tabassian, Hossein Omoumi & Kiya Tabassian (Iranian tombak, ney & setar), “Ateş-i Aşk” (Fire of Love) (2016) (45’)
- Electrocutango & Sverre Indris Joner, “Contrastes” (2021) (52’) highlights the sensual-sexual tension at the heart of the tango. These tracks sharpen the innate edge of the tango.
- Chaz Knapp & Mariel Roberts, “Setting Fire to These Dark Times” (2023) (38’) is “a new album of devastating, crushing beauty that marries dread-filled intensity with breathtaking bliss.”
- Lea Desandre & Thomas Dunford, “Songs of Passion” (2025) (94’) offers a Baroque-era take on passion from Purcell and Dowland, in the 16th and 17th centuries..
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Eurythmics, “Here Comes the Rain Again” (lyrics)
- Roberta Flack, “Killing Me Softly with His Song” (lyrics)
- Hugo Wolf, “Liebe mir im Busen zündet’ einen Brand” (Love in My Breast Kindled a Fire), from Spanisches Liederbruch (No. 17) (1890) (lyrics)
- Franz Schubert (composer), Sehnsucht (Longing), D. 123 (1814) (lyrics)
- Lynne Arriale Trio, “Passion”
Visual Arts
- Salvador Dali, Two Pieces of Bread Expressing the Sentiment of Love (1940)
- Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love) (1927)
- Konstantin Simov, A Youth on His Knees in Front of a Lady (1916)
- Gustav Klimt, Love (1895)
- Paul Cezanne, Bacchanalia. The Battle of Love (1880)
The ugly side of passion:
- Frida Kahlo, A Few Small Nips (Passionately in Love) (1935)
Film and Stage
Bizet’s Carmen is the face of unbridled passion.
- Carmen Jones, a film adaptation
- Carmen with Elena Garanca
- Carmen with Anna Caterina Antonacci
- Carmen with Agnes Baltsa
- Carmen with Julia Migenes
- Carmen with Nadia Krasteva
- Carmen with Béatrice Uria-Monzon
- Carmen with Anita Rachvelishvili
- Carmen with Marija Jokovic
Other films about passion:
- Red: a young woman and a despondent retired judge encounter each other through unhappy chance but then the young woman’s compassion produces “spiritual kinship and mutual redemption” as the stage is set for the young woman to achieve the passion that eluded the older man
- Children of Paradise(Les Enfants du Paradis), about a woman and a man who cannot forget each other.
- Gate of Hell: “the story of a thirteenth century warrior—a handsome and proud samurai—who falls in love with a dainty Japanese lady whom he aids and saves during a palace revolt and later requests in marriage, only to learn that she already is wed. Burning with a mad desire for her, he besieges her in her happy married state and causes her such shame and sorrow that she commits suicide” – the film illustrates the difference between Love and passion
- Notorious: not love, merely the passion of amore
- The Passion of Anna: Anna wears her passion most obviously of the characters but this is a film about the passions of many: “the ability to live with the contradictions of life and bear them without resignation”
- Swept Away: a man and a woman escalate a potentially lethal power struggle
- Woman of the Year: the attraction between the characters overpowers their differences, as did the mutual attraction of the film’s co-stars Tracy and Hepburn
