Status Updates From Eros dulce y amargo

'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

"Let us superimpose on the question ‘What does the lover want from love’ the questions ‘What does the reader want from reading? What is the
writer’s desire?’ Novels are the answer."

this too is orv...

'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.'

“Ay, camarada, el afloja-miembros me aplasta: el deseo.”……..

'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