Edward Hopper Western Motel painting

Edward Hopper Western Motel paintingEdgar Degas Rehearsal on the Stage paintingEdgar Degas Dancers in Pink painting
Real Karezza requires preparatory mental exercise. It requires first the understanding and conviction that the spiritual, the caressive, the tender side of the relation is much more important, much more productive of pleasure in fact, than the merely sexual, and that throughout the whole relation the sexual is to be held subordinate to this love side as its tool, its agent, its feeder. Sex is indeed required to furnish all it has to the feast, but strictly under the leadership of and to the glory of love.
It requires, second, the understanding and profound conviction that in this kind of love-feast the orgasm is a marplot, a kill-joy, an awkward and clumsy accident, and the end of everything for the time, therefore most undesired.
It requires, third, an understanding of the psychological law that all emotions are to a considerable extent capable of being "sublimated," that is expressed in a different direction and with reference to another object than that first intended. We have all seen orators or actors first arouse an audience to emotional intensity and then direct that emotion at pleasure to laughter or tears, to love or hate, revenge or pity, lust