Red and Black

"Le Rouge et le noir" as title of a Stendhal 1830 novel, sums up the intrinsic duality of human experience. The author’s fiction work, "The Red and the Black" exposes the tension between the red, the Army, and the black, the Church. But Stendhal also wrote about the Yin and Yang of the Romantic and the Rationalist, the bourgeois and elite, cynicism and hope, sexual conquest and tender love. The red and black as symbols can mean acid and base or liberal and conservative, but somewhere, somehow, a middle ground, a neutrality, a golden mean, common sense needs to be reached. A PH balance is necessary for metabolic and societal equilibrium. A quote in Stengelese ( from baseball legend Casey Stengel), will illustrate: "I’ve always heard it couldn’t be done; but sometimes it don’t always work." Compromise sometimes seems an impossibility between the red and the black; yet abandoning the attempt means that it will never work.