c’s Reviews > Eros the Bittersweet > Status Update

'It rotates on an axis of ephemerality: contingent upon the day (ephēmeron) it will melt with the day. But days recur. It rotates on an axis of novelty: as lover you are pulled into vertigo “over and over again.” You cannot want that, and yet you do. It is quite new every time.'

wow

'As the vowels and consonants of an alphabet interact symbolically to make a certain written word, so writer and reader bring together two halves of one meaning, so lover and beloved are matched together like two sides of one knucklebone. An intimate collusion occurs. The meaning composed is private and true and makes permanent, perfect sense. Ideally speaking, at least, that is the case.'

'To create pleasure and pain at once is the novelist’s aim. We should
dwell on this point for a moment. It is of some importance that, as
readers, we are typically and repeatedly drawn into a conflicted
emotional response which approximates that of the lover’s soul
divided by desire. Readership itself affords the aesthetic distance and
obliquity necessary for this response.'

so true

'Only a god’s word has no beginning or end. Only a god’s desire can reach without lack. Only the paradoxical god of desire, exception to all these rules, is neverendingly filled with lack itself.'

'Something paradoxical arrests the lover. Arrest occurs at a point of inconcinnity between the actual and the possible, a blind point where the reality of what we are disappears into the possibility of what we could be if we were other than we are. But we are not.'

'It is in the difference between cursive and typeface, between the real Vronsky and the imaginary one, between Sappho and “the man who listens closely,” between an actual knight and an empty suit of armour, that desire is felt. Across this space a spark of eros moves in the lover’s mind to activate delight. Delight is a movement (kinēsis) of the soul, in Aristotle’s definition. No difference: no movement. No Eros.'

'That which is known, attained, possessed, cannot be an object of desire.'

wow wow big fan of idealization and disillusionment. personally

'We have already detected an ancient analogy between language and love, implicit in the conception of breath as universal conductor of seductive influences and of persuasive speech.'

alexa play all this and heaven too by florence + the machine

'In Greek lyric poetry, eros is an experience of melting. The god of desire
himself is traditionally called “melter of limbs” (Sappho, LP, fr. 130;
Archilochos, West, IEG 196). His glance is “more melting than sleep or
death” (Alkman 3 PMG). The lover whom he victimizes is a piece of
wax, (Pindar, Snell-Maehler, fr. 123) dissolving at his touch.'

if i speak...

'All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the
true one, is coming into focus. A gust of godlikeness may pass through
you and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible
and present. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are
not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you
now see.'