Wallace Shawn, as Wikipedia notes, is considered by the world to be a comic actor. But read the essays of Wallace Shawn (son of the famous New Yorker editor), or see his plays, and you will quickly realize that this man, ordinary looking though he may be is, is as he was described in Manhattan -- a sexual animal. Unashamedly so.
(Woody Allen fans will recall that the Diane Keaton described her ex-husband that way in the movie to the Woody Allen character, and may recall as well how stunned Allen was when he found out that this "sexual animal" was a balding, nerdy looking character -- aka Wallace Shawn.)
But sex happens to nearly everyone, and takes us all by surprise. Which is one of the things that makes it so fascinating...and so enviro. As Shawn writes (in an essay from the Guardian, and Harpers):
...when I form a picture of myself, I see myself doing the sorts of things that humans do and only humans do - things like hailing a taxi, going to a restaurant, voting for a candidate in an election, or placing receipts in various piles and adding them up. If I'm unexpectedly reminded that my soul and body are capable of being totally swept up in a pursuit and an activity that pigs, flies, wolves, lions and tigers also engage in, my normal picture of myself is violently disrupted. In other words, consciously, I'm aware that I'm a product of evolution, and I'm part of nature. But my unconscious mind is still partially wandering in the early 19th century and doesn't know these things yet.
Writing about sex is really a variant of what Wordsworth did, that is, it's a variant of writing about nature, or as we call it now, "the environment". Sex is "the environment" coming inside, coming into our home or apartment and taking root inside our own minds.
Shawn goes on to argue that falling in love with beauty is akin to falling in love, period:
So it might not be absurd to say that if you love the body of another person, if you love another person, if you love a meadow, if you love a horse, if you love a painting or a piece of music or the sky at night, then the power of sex is flowing through you.
Yes, some people go through life astounded every day by the beauty of forests and animals; some are astounded more frequently by the beauty of art; and others by the beauty of other human beings. But science could one day discover that the ability to be astounded by the beauty of other human beings came first, and to me it seems implausible to imagine that these different types of astonishment or appreciation are psychologically unrelated.
Could Shawn be right? Without sex, we would not be able to love at all? Even this world, our home?
