To want something with sufficient fervor is to want it beyond the possibility of ever getting enough of it.

Desire is as good a guide to truth as anything else, but until eternity arrives, we will have to find somewhere to fit our appetites. One way to proceed is to shrink them—first by making concessions to smallness, then by framing contraction as wisdom or virtue.

clergyman Sydney Smith’s advice to a depressive: “Take short views of the human life—never further than dinner or tea.” Depression, too, is a form of waiting, for deliverance or vindication or a sudden onslaught of meaning that fails, devastatingly, to arrive.

But this isn’t possible, and I don’t really want it, anyway. If I were a part of you, I would not be apart from you and there would be no me in opposition to you, no you to elude me. Instead, I choose my waiting and the joy I find in surrender, in flinging myself at everything I encounter with the brutality of adoration.

UNFORTUNATELY, WE GET matters backward. The logic of justice, proper to the political and economic domain, has infused the whole of contemporary existence. While economic disparities remain fundamentally intact, we insist on equality in love and art, on order and proportion in our minds and houses.

As Barthes reminds us, there are two concepts in Greek for desire, one for the feeling of missing someone who’s left, and a second for the more curious sensation of missing someone beside me, someone who is with me but who remains less than fully accessible to me: “Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the

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.

perhaps the mania for equalizing everything but wealth is the product of a conceptual error: the conflation of two distinct notions, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. What should be equalized in the arts, and perhaps even in the romantic domain, is access: everybody should have a real chance to produce art (which requires both

Eroticism is one of the few forms of play permitted to adults. It occurs in a world parallel to the habitual one; it frees us to adopt new personas; it has a tendency to generate enduring communities whose members are "apart together" even when its excesses have come to an end; and, finally, it is dispensable and therefore indispensable.