Lipton’s Journal/February 14, 1955/594
Patience and impatience. They are the polar expressions of society-and-man, man-and-society. Our impatience comes from our desire to fuse with the universe, our patience is our recognition that society impedes the way and one cannot do it instantly.
But the two become reversed. The person S-oriented is impatient, impatient with delay, broken appointments, the inability to communicate, etc. (Etc. is the word symbol for infinity.) Etc. could be the title of a novel which ran a million pages out of trying to capture the total of a moment.
The person who is er-oriented like Ivan Von Auw[1] has patience. They can wait. They know that everybody and everything comes to its fulfillment (if it will—which is what gives them their sadness. Sadness and Gladness) comes to its fulfillment if one accepts, if one takes. So, what happens is that the S gives its essential nervous quality which is time—patience to the H, and the H gives its impatience—fusing to the S. The two people within us affect one another. Every man is a marriage within himself.
note
- ↑ Literary agent (1903-91) at the Harold Ober Agency.