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From: tim@unisoft.UUCP (Tim Bessie)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Re: Loving someone, sight unseen...
Message-ID: <594@unisoft.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 18-Nov-85 12:10:22 EST
Article-I.D.: unisoft.594
Posted: Mon Nov 18 12:10:22 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 23-Nov-85 07:47:44 EST
References: <278@cuuxb.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@unisoft.UUCP (Tim Bessie)
Distribution: net
Organization: UniSoft Systems, Berkeley
Lines: 44

In article <278@cuuxb.UUCP> frye@cuuxb.UUCP (frye) writes:
>I just read Tim Bessie's posting that said he didn't know
>how I could love my two friends in Portland. I suggest he
>ask someone who is blind how they could ever love anyone.
>If Tim does all of his loving with his eyes, he's not a
>very sincere person. In fact, he's a person I'd avoid like
>the plague.
     This is a good example of what I mean when I say that electronic
communication is limited.  I know, from your other postings, that you
agree it is limited, so I won't harp on that.  Perhaps I didn't give
you enough information in my article, didn't cover every possible
interpretation you might make, and so you misinterpreted it.
     Other people have responded to your articles and mine, and have said
what I will say now... not that love is purely visual, or that it needs
a visual component.  What I intended to say was that a living, breathing,
sweating, moving, touching, feeling human being will give you 2E100 *
more input as to what they are like than a letter will.  It will give
dimension to their personalities.  The way I write and even the way I
talk on the telephone can't even get close to what you would think of
me if you met me in person.  The fact that we can see, smell, hear, taste,
touch, and otherwise empathically FEEL each other will tell you so much
more than just reading or hearing me, that I think what we call 'love,'
in any realy deep meaning of the word, can't be got just by reading or
hearing.  I might love someone the way I 'love' chocolate ice cream
or the way I 'love' Robin Williams... by taste, or just sight and hearing...
but I won't love them with every part of me, with my whole heart, if my
experience of them is in only one or two dimensions.  I need to know them
in all their dimensions if I want to LOVE them in all their dimensions.
     Of course, I could just be a person who loves PEOPLE, in which case
I don't even have to have heard of them to love them.  I'm not downgrading
this... I just haven't reached a state where I love EVERYONE.

				- Tim

---

	Life is like an onion; you keep peeling off the layers,
	and sometimes you weep.
				- Carl Sandburg
	---------------------------------------------------------------

---> Tim Bessie ----- {ucbvax,dual}!unisoft!tim
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