Sublime

Set a goal that you could not exceed even if you wanted to. Dismiss at last those treacherous goods that are more valuable in expectation than they are in attainment. If there were anything solid in them, we would eventually be sated with them; as it is, they make us thirsty even as we drink.* Get rid of the baggage; it is only for looks. As for

In my empty enchanted hands I hold fabulous treasure; the immense nothingness of heaven, the vacancy of space, and time’s fleet magic. Look how it has transformed me. For I am now crowned with negation, mantled with absence, throned on nothingness, empress of exceeding glory, the splendour and wealth of love and death.

need nothing; nothing never hurt you when it left.

renunciation arises specifically from perceiving the defects of indulging in the objects of the senses, in other words, from discrimination.

And her love that now was impossible — that was dry the way the fever of someone who doesn’t sweat was love without opium or morphine.

to represent eros as deferred, defied, obstructed, hungry, organized around a radiant absence—to represent eros as lack.

This is a warning against neediness, which, according to the poet Lucretius (who brought Epicurus to a later Roman audience), is the destroyer of love. Neediness sets up another futile aim: we can never get enough from people towards whom we feel needy. They may provide on one occasion, but when they fall short of our inflated expectations the next

something quick and black, a gap, more like an absence.