Alison Rose’s Reviews > Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay > Status Update

The unplucked apple, the beloved just out of touch, the meaning not quite attained, are desirable objects of knowledge. It is the enterprise of eros to keep them so. The unknown must remain unknown or the novel ends. As all paradoxes are, in some way, paradoxes about paradox, so all eros is, to some degree, desire for desire.

Every hunting, hungering lover is half a knucklebone, wooer of a meaning inseparable from its absence. The moment when we understand these things--when we see what we are projected on a screen of what we could be--is invariably a moment of wrench&arrest. We love that moment&hate it. We have to keep going back to it, after all, if we wish to maintain contact w/the possible. But this also entails watching it disappear.