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p131 - Lullaby - Auden - Collected Poems

He once painted a landscape in the garden and there was a tree in the landscape. Later on he took this canvas into his studio and tried to arrange it a little bit and there was this tree in this canvas which didn't fit in - it was against the harmony of the whole thing. So he decided finally to take out this tree: to suppress the tree in his canvas. O.K. And the canvas looked very good afterwards. But then his conscious was so upset by the fact that he had told a

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lie, as he thought, that he finally decided to suppress the tree also in the garden. He cut it down! It was the most beautiful tree we had in the garden. p.162-3

Max Ernst talking about his father - Monitor ed. Wheldon

9.17.81

...We never experience sexual desire as a blind need which is indifferent to its sexual object: our personal history and our culture introduce a selective element so that, even on the most physical level, some types are more desirable than others. Our sexual desire, as such is impersonal in that it lacks all consideration for the person who is our type, but personal in that our type is our personal taste, not a blind need.

This contradiction is fertile ground for self-deception. It allows us to persuade ourselves that we value the person of another, when, in fact we only value her (or him) as a sexual object, and it allows us to endow her with an imaginary personality which