Eros […] acts out of a love of paradox, that is as he folds the beloved object out of sight into a mystery, into a blind point where it can float known and unknown, actual and possible, near and far, desired and drawing you on.
God had the book of life open at PLEASURE and was holding the pages down in one hand because of the wind from the door. For I made their flesh as a sieve wrote God at the top of the page and then listed in order:
Alcohol Blood Gratitude Memory Semen Song Tears Time.
the word 'mute' is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing to be seen hiding.
O amor é como ficar louco. A gente pensa que vai morrer, mas não, a gente tem que suportar tudo, queimar até a alma e continuar vivendo. O amor é morrer e renascer a cada instante, é se transformar, é nunca mais voltar a ser o mesmo.
When you are in love the greatest certainty is felt about the beloved as necessary complement to you. Your powers of imagination calling up possibilities from beyond the actual. All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus.
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.
I want to know who you are. People talk about a voice calling in the wilderness. All through the Old Testament a voice, which is not the voice of God but which knows what is on God’s mind, is crying out. While I am waiting, you could do me a favour. Who are you?
The beginning is not fictive. It cannot be placed in the control of a writer or reader. We should note that the Greek verb ‘to read’ is anagignōskein, a compound of the verb ‘to know’ (gignōskein) and the prefix ana, meaning ‘again.’ If you are reading, you are not at the beginning.
As lover you reach forward to a point in time called ‘then’ when you will bite into the long-desired apple. Meanwhile you are aware that as soon as ‘then’ supervenes upon ‘now,’ the bittersweet moment, which is your desire, will be gone. You cannot want that, and yet you do.
As syntax, it impressed us as something of a subterfuge: properly a noun, eros acts everywhere like a verb. Its action is to reach, and the reach of desire involves every lover in an activity of the imagination.
On the surface of it, the lover wants the beloved. This, of course, is not really the case. Union would be annihilating. What the lover needs is to be able to face the beloved and yet not be destroyed.
Lovers float in that “pure portion of anxiety,” the present indicative of desire. They are astonished when they fall in love, they are equally astonished when they fall out of love.
The lover helplessly admits that it feels both good and bad to be mixed up, but is then driven back upon the question ‘Once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?’ Desire changes the lover. The change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before.
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 (Rh. 1.1369b19). No difference: no movement. No Eros.
