“For me love is like this,” writes the narrator of Mating: You’re in one room or apartment which you think is fine, then you walk through a door and close it behind you and find yourself in the next apartment, which is even better, larger, more floorspace, a better view. You’re happy there and then you go into the next apartment and close the door

In these fictions, as in reality, it is usually the men who command the greater share of power—but in at least some of them, as in some lucky lives, romantic equality is so potent that it overcomes asymmetries in situation.

Beauvoir is right to observe that the kind of equality romance requires cannot involve a collapse into tedious sameness. Instead, she reminds us, “genuine love ought to be founded on the mutual recognition of two liberties; the lovers would then experience themselves both as self and as other,” as people in their own right who are also changed by t

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle comes closest to addressing the lover’s predicament when he observes that “friendships involve equality.… This becomes clear if there is a great interval in respect of virtue or vice or wealth or anything else between the parties; for then they are no longer friends, and do not even expect to be so.” Aristotle d

We are drawn toward a beautiful thing, as Weil says, “without knowing what to ask of it,” but wanting to ask something. Even when we have it, we continue to want it: “We do not desire anything else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something.

But, as Nagel knew, there are also things “about the world and life and ourselves that cannot be adequately understood from a maximally objective standpoint” but only from deep in the mud of the everyday mind. Among these are absorptions, immersions, and ecstasies of all sorts, for what is sometimes called a “flow state” involves an entirely differ

The mindful person is sure to protest that the supposed “self” is a fiction in the first place: we know that it is, Harris declares, because “when we look closely, it vanishes.” But first of all, is this true? When I retreat inward and look closely, the spikiness I have always associated with myself prickles and persists. It’s here right now, delig

The urge to detach from every emotion, every judgment, every preference, every wish that the world were otherwise, every fit of temper, every bout of petulance, is the urge for death itself. To live at all is to yearn to be somewhere besides where we are, and to make every effort to get there.

Responding to the Stoic philosophers who urged that we emulate nature in vacating our emotions, Nietzsche scoffs, Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power