Though she was by conventional standards closer to plain than to pretty and had a gait, somebody once remarked, like the oxen in Homer, she nonetheless radiated erotic significance. People felt it in her, just as she felt it in them: there was something here that mattered, though what it was remained impossible to convey in words. At Oxford especially, virtually everyone she had anything to do with fell in love with her. She had marriage proposals the way some people have hiccups. She had only to ride by on a bicycle or lean an elbow on a table during a lecture to become an object of fascination. One otherwise apparently normal young man glanced out a window, caught a glimpse of her as she passed by – an unknown young woman in an academic gown walking with a friend – and immediately jumped up, ran outside, and followed her into Fraenkel’s Agamemnon seminar, where the young infatuate proceeded to ignore Fraenkel and to look at her, entranced, until the seminar ended. Often enough she seems to have done nothing in particular to invite this interest. The mere sight of her was enough. But once opportunity offered she was incapable of refusing: ‘There has never been a moment when I have trembled on the brink of such an exchange and drawn back,’ she wrote of one admittedly foolish out-of-nowhere kiss. ‘One of my fundamental assumptions is that I have the power to seduce anyone,’ she wrote another time. As one of the many men she was engaged to remarked, she was ‘monumentally unfaithful’. She made a joke about ‘there having been only one man in Oxford she had not had an affair with’. These affairs, some of them lasting for years, others hours, most of them kept secret from the participants in rival affairs, ran not just serially but also simultaneously, in packs or even swarms. She slept with strangers and friends, men and women. - despre Iris Murdoch, bomba tantrica
Posted on: Thu, 01 Aug 2013 11:44:55 +0000