Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton Classics)

by Anne Carson

When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim.

Breaks interrupt time and change its data. Archilochos’ written texts break pieces of passing sound off from time and hold them as his own.

Breaks make a person think.

When I contemplate the physical spaces that articulate the letters ‘I love you’ in a written text, I may be led to think about other spaces, for example the space that lies between ‘you’ in the text and you in my life. Both of these kinds of space come into being by an act of symbolization. Both require the mind to reach out fr...

In letters as in love, to imagine is to address onese...

discomfort of learning these skills for the first time. Think how much energy, time and emotion goes into that effort of learning: it absorbs years of your life and dominates your self-esteem; it informs much of your subsequent endeavor to grasp and communicate with the world.

Transference arises in almost every psychoanalytic relationship when the patient insists on falling in love with the doctor, despite the latter’s determined aloofness, warnings and discouragement. An important lesson in erotic mistrust is available to the analysand who observes himself concocting in this way a love object out of thin air.

They are tactics of imagination, which sometimes turn upon enhancing the beloved, sometimes upon reconceiving the lover, but which are all aimed at defining one certain edge or difference: an edge between two images that cannot merge in a single focus because they do not derive from the same level of reality—one is actual, one is possible. To know both, keeping the difference visible, is the subterfuge called eros.

I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive.

The English word ‘symbol’ is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of symbol. So is a lover.

As a writer he knows their story must end and wants it to end. So, too, as readers we know the novel must end and want it to end. “But not yet!” say the readers to the writer. “But not yet!” says the writer to his hero and heroine. “But not yet!” says the beloved to the lover. And so the reach of desire continues.

A paradox is a kind of thinking that reaches out but never arrives at the end of its thought. Each time it reaches out, there is a shift of distance in mid-reasoning that prevents the answer from being grasped.

In the novel this technique of shifting distance is taken over as the permanent attitude from which the reader views the action. Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros.

Longus has chosen a somewhat curious verb with which to suspend the apple from the tree: epeteto (3.33) is from petomai, the verb ‘to fly.’ It is generally used of creatures with wings or of emotions that swoop through the heart.

The female creature is a letter (epistle). The unborn children are the letters (of the alphabet) it carries. And the letters, although they have no voices, speak to people far away, whomever they wish. But if some other person happens to be standing right beside the one who is reading, he will not hear. (Antiphanes, CAF, fr. 196; Ath. 450c)

(for death keeps life visible while making it absent).

So time forms a ring around desire.