the pleasure of the text is scandalous: not because it is immoral but because it is atopic .”

The word Plato used is atopia , a concept describing the ineffability of things or emotions that are seldom experienced, that are outstanding, and that are original in the strict sense.

Knowing that you can be deeply moved—intellectually and physically—but you can never fully grasp another in their entirety.

“The few moments of real presence you have ever felt in your life might mean that a god was inside someone near you, using them to see you. The few moments of real insight we’ve ever had about another might indicate that a god was inside us at that moment, using us to see them. When they brighten the characteristics of another person, it is like... See more

The ability to see beyond —beyond good and evil sure, but also beyond comfort, success, achievement, domesticity, beyond even our selves—and look toward nuance (towards the erotic!) which means engulfment, annihilation, death.

The tusk pierces Adonis.

Cupid’s dart takes aim at St. Sebastian.

The nail is driven into Christ’s flesh spilling out his... See more

In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson describes eros as “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”

All in all, desire, romance, eros, pleasure is about following the path of ineffability and unknowingness. Phenomenologically it’s about keeping the Other as not an extension of you—your wants, your desires, your understandings—but their own distinct, distanced essence. They are not you. They are not for you. They are other. And it is because of... See more

“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”

Twentieth-century philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, described the caress as a “game with something slipping away.”