As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that love reveals our true selves and challenges us to confront our innermost desires and potential.
Anne Carson reflects on the transformative power of love, as depicted through the figure of Eros, the god of love. According to her interpretation of Socratic thought, encountering love is a profound experience that compels individuals to grapple with their innermost selves, revealing not only their strengths and weaknesses but also their aspirations. This confrontation is both a risk and an opportunity, serving as a measure of one’s personal growth and inner character.
In practice
During a wedding toast, one might say this quote to highlight the power of love in personal growth.
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.
[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
Once that living love is destroyed by contraception, abortion follows very easily.
In the garden _x000D_ I see only your face _x000D_ From trees and blossoms _x000D_ I inhale only your fragrance.
Love, oneness, is no separation between you and life. It is a progressive letting go, a progressive not fault finding. Just do nothing and love this moment. Its very beautiful and very deep.
And Father said, "Christopher, do you understand that I love you?" And I said "Yes," because loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father looks after me when I get into trouble, like coming to the police station, and he looks after me by cooking meals for me, and he always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me.
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