“What we did: love. We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.”
– The Third Thing by Donald Hall
Thank you for sharing this. I love Hall’s list of things that can be ‘third things’.. ‘John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.’
Dec 20th, 2023 / 9:52 pm