“Love is the active concern for the life and growth of that which we love.…the essence of love is to ‘labour’ for something and to ‘make something grow’; love and labour are inseparable. One loves that for which one labours, and one labours for that which one loves.”
-Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Frozen Pineapple Grass. Pentax MX, Cinestill 50D, July 2025.
‘To be responsible means to be able and ready to ‘respond’… The loving person responds… Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation… To respect a person is not possible without knowing him: care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge… There are many layers of knowledge: the knowledge which is an aspect of love is one which does not stay at the periphery, but penetrates to the core.”
-Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Snowy Snowy North. Pentax MX, Cinestill 50D, July 2025.
“The basic need to fuse with another person so as to transcend the prison of one’s separateness is closely related to another specifically human desire, that to know the ‘secret of man’… There is one way, a desperate one, to know the secret: it is that of complete power over another person: the power which makes him do what we want, feel what we want, think what we want; which transforms him into a thing, our thing, our possession. The ultimate degree of this attempt to know lies in the extremes of sadism, the desire and ability to make a human being suffer; to torture him, to force him to betray his secret in his suffering…
The other path to knowing the ‘secret’ is love. In the act of fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody - and I ‘know’ nothing… Love is the only way of knowledge, which in the act of union answers my quest. In the act of loving, of giving myself, in the act of penetrating the other person, I find myself, I discover myself, I discover us both. I discover man.”
-Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Then there are other secrets… such as the secrets of the South-West… Pentax MX, Cinestill 50D, July 2025.