Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

Book Overview

Anne Carson’s first book is a small, strange, brilliant thing. One hundred and sixty-odd pages, thirty-four short essay-chapters, a preface, and an essay-question running under the whole: what does the Greek word glukupikron — Sappho’s invention, “sweetbitter” — actually know about being alive?

Carson was a classicist at McGill when she wrote it. She would later become, among other things, one of the most important living poets in English. Eros the Bittersweet is the hinge where classicist and poet are the same person and haven’t yet decided which will win. The prose is aphoristic, allusive, formally tight. The argument is not an argument exactly but a circling — she picks up a single fragment of Sappho, turns it over, looks at its shadow on Homer, on Plato, on the invention of the alphabet, on the Greek novel, on Zeno, on Velazquez, on Kafka, and sets it back down. Each time you see something different inside it.

The book moves in three big cycles. It opens on Sappho fragment 130 and the whole lyric tradition after her, developing a geometry of erotic desire — lover, beloved, and the obstacle that makes them visible to each other. Around chapter ten, Carson performs her most original move: she argues that the Greek alphabet, which introduced the silent consonant as a unit of sound, trained a generation of writer-lovers to perceive everything (including desire) as bounded units meeting at edges. The literate self, she proposes, is the eroticizable self. The middle cycle traces this into the Greek romance novels and the act of reading itself. The final third is a slow eccentric reading of Plato’s Phaedrus — the dialogue that simultaneously condemns erotic madness and stages it, that writes against writing, that tries to freeze eros in ink and watches eros walk off the page. The closing chapter names her own essay mythoplokos, Sappho’s word for Eros: weaver of fictions.

This summary follows Carson’s own chapter structure, with generous excerpts. Carson’s sentences do not paraphrase well — her compressions are the point — so the reader will hear her voice throughout. The connective prose is there to thread the quotations and keep the argument legible, not to replace her thinking. The book is short. The summary is long. That is appropriate: Carson wrote a book that rewards re-reading slowly, and a deep summary tries to reproduce the benefit of the slow second pass.

A small note on spelling and terminology. Greek words stay in italics and are glossed once — eros (lack, want, desire for what is missing), logos (word, speech, discourse, reason), glukupikron (sweetbitter), phrenes (lungs / seat of thought), aidōs (shamefastness), symbolon (broken token), mythoplokos (weaver of fictions). Greek proper names keep their Greek-style spelling (Sokrates, not Socrates; Archilochos, Theokritos, Empedokles). Phaedrus, the dialogue, is italicized; Phaedrus, the character, is not. Fragment numbers follow Carson’s own system: LP (Lobel-Page), PMG (Page, Poetae Melici Graeci), West’s IEG, Radt’s Sophokles, and so on.

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Preface

Carson opens not with Sappho but with Kafka. A small parable, set as the doorway to a book about Greek love.

Kafka’s “The Top” is a story about a philosopher who spends his spare time around children so he can grab their tops in spin. To catch a top still spinning makes him happy for a moment in his belief “that the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things.” Disgust follows delight almost at once and he throws down the top, walks away.

The pattern repeats. The children prepare; the philosopher’s hope returns; he runs.

as soon as the top began to spin and he was running breathlessly after it, the hope would turn to certainty but when he held the silly piece of wood in his hand he felt nauseated.

Then she names what the story is. Twice — once for metaphor, once for love — and the two namings are the same gesture.

The story is about the delight we take in metaphor. A meaning spins, remaining upright on an axis of normalcy aligned with the conventions of connotation and denotation, and yet: to spin is not normal, and to dissemble normal uprightness by means of this fantastic motion is impertinent.

The top is the figure for any meaning that holds itself up while moving. Stable and improper at once. The questions that follow are the book’s questions, asked plainly:

What is the relation of impertinence to the hope of understanding? To delight?

And then the pivot from logos to eros.

The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

The catch is not the point. The reach is. Carson closes by inverting the philosopher’s relation to his own profession — and with it, the lover’s relation to the beloved.

Suppression of impertinence is not the lover’s aim. Nor can I believe this philosopher really runs after understanding. Rather, he has become a philosopher (that is, one whose profession is to delight in understanding) in order to furnish himself with pretexts for running after tops.

The book’s argument, in two pages: eros and metaphor share a structure, and the wanting is the having.

Chapter 1: Bittersweet

Carson opens with a single attribution and a single word. Sappho was the first to call eros bittersweet, and no one who has been in love has come forward to argue. The word she actually used was glukupikron — sweetbitter, in that order. The English inversion is already a small betrayal. Carson keeps the Greek so we keep the sequence:

Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up (LP, fr. 130)

The sweetness is the easy part. We take the pleasurability of desire for granted; “its pleasurability smiles out at us.” The puzzle is the bitterness. Why should the same instant carry both? Carson is careful to rule out the obvious chronological reading — first the honey, then the hangover. Sappho’s verbs are present-tense, the scene is now (dēute, donei), and the poem is not the diary of an affair but the snapshot of a single moment in which one mental state splits in two. Sweetness comes first in the compound only because it is less surprising. The weight falls on what follows.

What follows arrives from outside. Eros creeps on its victim (orpeton) and cannot be fought off (amachanon). It is not an inhabitant of the desirer, not an ally, but something that forces itself on her against her will. From which Carson draws her first hard sentence:

Eros is an enemy. Its bitterness must be the taste of enmity. That would be hate.

This is the paradox in its crudest form: love and hate located inside a single emotional event, in the single being who occasions it. Carson notes it has become almost a cliché in the modern literary imagination — Anna Karenina, on the way to Moscow Station, whispers that hate begins where love leaves off — but the configuration is much older than Eros himself. She finds it first not in a love poem but in an argument on the wall of Troy.

Helen, fed up, refuses to go to Paris’ bed. Aphrodite turns the screw:

Damn you woman, don’t provoke me—I’ll get angry and let you drop! I’ll come to hate you as terribly as I now love you! (Il. 3.414-15)

Helen obeys. Love and hate together make an irresistible enemy. What Sappho compresses into the adjective glukupikron, Homer unfolds in dramatic sequence — epic convention prefers to show a divided mind through antithetical actions — but the conclusion is the same: the divinity of desire is an ambivalent being, friend and enemy at once.

Carson then gathers the chorus. Aristophanes, on the demos and Alkibiades: potheî mén, echthaírei dé, boúletai d’ échein — “they love him and they hate him and they long to possess him.” Aeschylus on Menelaos, drifting through his empty palace after Helen has gone, longing (pothos) and hating (echthetai) in the same breath:

Because of his longing for something gone across the sea a phantom seems to rule the rooms, and the grace of statues shaped in beauty comes to be an object of hate for the man. In the absences of eyes all Aphrodite is vacant, gone. (Ag. 414-19)

Then a Hellenistic epigram from Nicharchos, the figure tied into a knot:

If you love me, you hate me. And if you hate me, you love me. Now if you don’t hate me, beloved, don’t love me. (Anth. Pal. 11.252)

And Catullus, who distills the whole tradition into two lines:

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why? you might ask. I don’t know. But I feel it happening and I hurt. (Catullus 85)

Greek lyric, Carson notes, sometimes works at this level of stark concept, but its preference is physiology. The split soul is felt in the body. Sappho’s tongue tastes bitter and sweet; her successors elaborate the contradiction across the senses. “Bitter honey,” “sweet wound,” “Eros of sweet tears.” Hot and cold collide in Anakreon —

With his huge hammer again Eros knocked me like a blacksmith and doused me in a wintry ditch (PMG 413)

— while Sophokles compares the experience to a lump of ice melting in warm hands. Later poets braid the registers together: “sweet fire,” lovers “burned by honey,” arrows “tempered in honey.” Ibykos goes wet against dry, with desire’s black thunderstorm bringing not rain but “parching madnesses.” Carson concedes there are ancient theories of physiology lurking behind these tropes — the pleasurable as hot, liquid, melting; the hateful as cold and rigid — but no clean map exists. Desire isn’t simple. The Greek act of love is a mingling (mignumi); desire is what melts the limbs (lusimelēs). Boundaries of body, categories of thought, are confounded. The god who melts the limbs goes on to break the lover (damnatai) like a foe on the battlefield:

Oh comrade, the limb-loosener crushes me: desire. (Archilochos, West, IEG 196)

The crisis spreads from sensation into the wreck of judgment and action. Sappho breaks off mid-sentence: “I don’t know what I should do: two states of mind in me…” Anakreon goes louder: “I’m in love! I’m not in love! I’m crazy! I’m not crazy!” An anonymous lover, looking at Diophantos, “can neither flee nor stay.” Sophokles supplies the formula: “Desire keeps pulling the lover to act and not to act.” And moral evaluation fractures along the same fault line. Euripides arms his Eros with a “double” bow — one shot brings a lovely life, the other complete collapse — and in a lost play even doubles the god, twin Erotes who guide the lover toward virtue or toward the house of death.

Carson closes the chapter by returning to the photographic figure she has been quietly preparing:

“Sweetbitter eros” is what hits the raw film of the lover’s mind. Paradox is what takes shape on the sensitized plate of the poem, a negative image from which positive pictures can be created.

Whether the contradiction registers as sensation, as action, or as value, the print comes back the same. Love and hate converge inside erotic desire. The chapter ends on the single word it has been building toward: Why?

Chapter 2: Gone

There are several answers, Carson allows. One is clearer in Greek than in any of its translations. The Greek word eros does not denote a feeling so much as a condition of lacking. Want, need, desire for what is missing. The lover wants what he does not have, and by definition cannot have what he wants — the moment it is had, it is no longer wanted.

This is more than wordplay. There is a dilemma within eros that has been thought crucial by thinkers from Sappho to the present day.

Plato turns and returns to it across four dialogues: desire is only ever for what is lacking, not at hand, not present, not in one’s possession nor in one’s being. Eros entails endeia. Diotima, in the Symposium, gives the genealogy: Eros is the bastard begotten by Wealth on Poverty, ever at home in a life of want.

Simone Weil reaches for hunger as the analog:

All our desires are contradictory, like the desire for food. I want the person I love to love me. If he is, however, totally devoted to me he does not exist any longer and I cease to love him. And as long as he is not totally devoted to me he does not love me enough. Hunger and repletion. (1977, 364)

Emily Dickinson, briskly, in “I Had Been Hungry”:

So I found that hunger was a way of persons outside windows that entering takes away.

Petrarch translates the same shape back into the old physiology of fire and ice:

I know to follow while I flee my fire I freeze when present; when absent, hot is my desire. (“Trionfo d’Amore”)

Sartre, less patient, calls the contradictory ideal of desire a “dupery” — erotic relations as a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror-game that frustrates itself. Simone de Beauvoir hardens it into torture: “The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. This is the torture of impossible love…” Lacan, characteristically obscure, gathers the same point into a sentence: “Desire … evokes lack of being under the three figures of the nothing that constitutes the basis of the demand for love, of the hate that even denies the other’s being, and of the unspeakable element in that which is ignored in its request.”

A common perception, Carson concludes, threads through these very different voices. She states it with the calm of someone naming a physical law:

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

And then she returns, as she will keep returning, to Sappho. Fragment 130 — the sweetbitter fragment we began with — is preserved in Hephaestion alongside two further lines in the same meter, very likely from the same poem:

Atthis, your care for me stirred hatred in you and you flew to Andromeda. (LP, fr. 131)

The lover is gone. She has flown to someone else. That, Carson is suggesting, is not an accident appended to the sweetbitter complaint — it is its cause. The chapter ends with a sentence that lands like a verdict and an etymology at once:

Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.

Chapter 3: Ruse

The chapter opens under an inscription Plato hung over the door of his Academy: Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry. Carson is signalling the turn she is about to make. The bittersweet was a feeling. Now she wants its shape.

She begins with what she calls “something pure and indubitable” about the idea that eros is lack. Once you adopt it, it changes how you see — your “habits and representations of love” rearrange around it. To show what she means, she opens Sappho’s fragment 31, “one of the best-known love poems in our tradition.” She prints the Greek and then the English:

He seems to me equal to gods that man who opposite you sits and listens close to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing—oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking is left in me no: tongue breaks, and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead—or almost I seem to me.

Carson reads the poem like staging without a program. The actors slip in and out of focus. The man “looms beyond the footlights, somewhat more than mortal” in line 1 — isos theoisin , equal to the gods — and then dissolves at line 2 into a pronoun ( ottis ) so vague the scholars cannot agree what it means. The poet herself “steps mysteriously from the wings of a relative clause at line 5” and takes over the action. The poem is not about the three of them as individuals, she says, but “about the geometrical figure formed by their perception of one another, and the gaps in that perception. It is an image of the distances between them.”

She traces the lines of force: the girl’s voice and laughter travel along one line to the man who listens close. A second line connects the girl to the poet. Between the eye of the poet and the listening man “crackles a third current. The figure is a triangle.”

Why a triangle? The obvious answer is jealousy, and many critics have said so. Just as many deny it. Carson takes the disagreement seriously enough to ask whether everyone means the same thing by the word. Zēlos , the Greek root, means zeal, fervent pursuit — “a hot and corrosive spiritual motion arising in fear and fed on resentment.” The jealous lover fears displacement; he covets a particular place in the beloved’s affection. To make this concrete, Carson reaches for a 15th-century Italian dance called the bassa danza , in one version of which “three men and three women permute partners and each man goes through a stage of standing by himself apart from the others.” That, she says, is jealousy: a dance in which everyone moves, because instability is the thing that preys on the jealous mind.

Sappho does not move. “Were she to change places with the man who listens closely, it seems likely she would be entirely destroyed.” She does not covet his seat. She does not resent him. “She is simply amazed at his intrepidity.” Whatever the man is doing in the structure of the poem, jealousy does not explain it.

Carson tries the other standard reading — the rhetorical one. The man is a hypothesis, a foil, the cliché lover-poets use when they want to praise a beloved by saying He must be made of stone who could resist you. Pindar does it; the Hellenistic epigrammatists do it. Carson rejects this for Sappho too. The “register of normality is missing” from the poem. Sappho is not aligning herself with ordinary human response. Twice she names the real location of the poem: “He seems to me… I seem to me.” This, Carson writes, “is a disquisition on seeming and it takes place entirely within her own mind.”

Then comes the structural claim, quietly. The man who listens closely is “no sentimental cliché or rhetorical device. He is a cognitive and intentional necessity. Sappho perceives desire by identifying it as a three-part structure.” Triangle is the right word, but “ruse” is wrong if it implies trick. “The ruse of the triangle is not a trivial mental maneuver. We see in it the radical constitution of desire.”

The sentence to underline is this one:

For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components — lover, beloved and that which comes between them. They are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart.

The third component does double work. It connects and it separates. It marks that “two are not one” and so it “irradiates the absence whose presence is demanded by eros.” When the three points connect, perception leaps. Something becomes visible that the two-part scene could not show. “The difference between what is and what could be is visible. The ideal is projected on a screen of the actual, in a kind of stereoscopy.” The man sits like a god; the poet almost dies. Two poles of one desiring mind, made simultaneously visible by a shift of distance.

The chapter ends with a line that closes the figure and opens the book:

For in this dance the people do not move. Desire moves. Eros is a verb.

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Chapter 4: Tactics

If the triangle is the structure, this chapter walks the reader through the moves that produce it. Carson begins by widening the field. “The ruse of inserting a rival between lover and beloved is immediately effective, as Sappho’s poem shows, but there are more ways than one to triangulate desire.” Not every tactic looks triangular in action, but they all share a project: to “represent eros as deferred, defied, obstructed, hungry, organized around a radiant absence — to represent eros as lack.”

The first tactic is the simplest: space. “Mere space has power.” The troubadours called courtly love l’amour d’loonh , “love from a distance.” She remembers Menelaos haunted in his empty palace by “absences of eyes in the statues.” She compares Virgil’s Dido, whose desire echoes through the streets of Carthage:

illum absens absentem auditque uidetque… him not there not there she hears him, she sees him.

Theognis turns the same vacancy into a wry domestic complaint to his boy: “We aren’t shutting you out of the revel, and we aren’t inviting you, either. / For you’re a pain when you’re present, and beloved when you’re away.”

Distance can be marked by motion. Atalanta runs; her suitors chase. Carson notes that across Greek erotic poetry and vase-painting, the moment artists keep returning to “is not the moment of the coup de foudre , not the moment when the beloved’s arms open to the lover, not the moment when the two unite in happiness. What is pictured is the moment when the beloved turns and runs.” The verbs pheugein (to flee) and diōkein (to pursue) become technical vocabulary. Theognis confesses, “There is a certain exquisite pleasure in the wavering of the balance.” Kallimachos calls his own eros a perverse hunter who “bypasses game that lies available, for it knows only to pursue what flees.”

If you do not want to run, you can throw. An apple is the conventional missile of love. The lover’s ball, sphaira , is another, tossed so often as a love challenge that Eros himself becomes Eros Ballplayer in later poetry. The glance is a projectile too, from the “slantwise stare” of Anakreon’s flirting Thracian filly to Astymeloisa’s glance “more melting than sleep or death” to Eros looking out “down from underneath blue eyelids.”

Eyelids matter, and here Carson opens out into a small essay on aidōs. A fragment in Stobaeus says Aidōs dwells on the eyelids of sensitive people, hybris on the insensitive. Carson translates aidōs as “shamefastness” and gives it her best definition:

Aidōs (‘shamefastness’) is a sort of voltage of decorum discharged between two people approaching one another for the crisis of human contact, an instinctive and mutual sensitivity to the boundary between them.

It is the shyness of the suppliant at the hearth, the guest before his host, the youth giving way to age, and the radiant shyness between lover and beloved. Its proverbial home on the eyelids is a way of saying that “aidōs exploits the power of the glance by withholding it.” In erotic contexts it can stand “like a third presence.” A Sappho fragment records the man who tries to speak: “I want to say something to you, but aidos prevents me…” Carson calls this “static electricity” — “a very discreet way of marking that two are not one.”

More vulgarly, aidōs takes the shape of an object or a gesture. The vases show it. Pederastic vases keep returning to one moment: a man touches a boy on chin and genitals (the customary gesture of erotic invitation), the boy’s right arm turns the man’s hand away from his chin (the customary gesture of dissuasion). One vase carries an inscribed dialogue across the moment: “Let me!” “Stop it!” Carson reads this image of intersecting gestures as the painters’ summary of erotic experience. “Eros is often sweeter when he is being difficult,” says a Hellenistic poet.

In heterosexual scenes, the veil does the same work. Penelope confronting suitors “holds her veil up on either side of her face.” Medea, at the moment she abandons chastity for Jason, does the opposite — “holds her veil aside.” Plato folds the motif into his Symposium , where Alkibiades describes the night he tried to seduce Sokrates and ended up sleeping beside him under two cloaks, “no more ‘slept with’ Sokrates than if I had lain down with my father or elder brother.” Carson reads the two cloaks — Alkibiades’ wrapped around Sokrates against the cold, Sokrates’ worn coat thrown over Alkibiades — as a “concrete symbol of his own contradictory desire.” Both the embrace and the separation are his. “Eros is lack: Alkibiades reifies the lover’s guiding principle almost as self-consciously as Tristan, who places a drawn sword between himself and Iseult when they lie down to sleep in the forest.”

The principle is reified socially, too. A society that prizes both the chastity and the prolificacy of women assigns to the beloved “the role of seductive unattainability.” A “titillating triangle” forms between the lover, the bad girl who attracts him, and the good girl who honours him by saying no. Carson reaches for the Athenian archetype through Pausanias’ speech in the Symposium , which sets out the contradictory ethic by which Athenian men were encouraged to chase boys while boys were praised for refusing them. Pausanias calls this poikilos nomos , and Carson dwells on the phrase. Nomos means law, custom, convention — something fixed. Poikilos is the word for anything variegated, dappled, spangled, intricately wrought, abstruse, devious. “The phrase verges on oxymoron.” The Athenian rule is poikilos because it recommends an ambivalent code (chase but do not catch), and also because it answers to a phenomenon “whose essence and loveliness is in its ambivalence.” The doubleness in the law mirrors the doubleness in the heart.

She closes the chapter with the most blatant ritualization of all: the Cretan custom of harpagmos , the staged abduction of a beloved boy by his lover, opening with a gift-exchange, ending with a two-month sojourn in hiding. The boy’s family stands by uttering “token cries of distress.” The historian Ephoros, fourth century, whispers the tell: “If the man is equal to or superior to the boy, people follow and resist the rape only enough to satisfy the law but are really glad…” Greek wedding rites import the same imagery — Spartan brides mock-abducted, painted brides on vases pulling the veil across the face in the ritual gesture of female aidōs , the bridegroom hauling them diagonally onto the chariot. These are not myth scenes, Carson insists, but ideal representations of normal weddings, “bristling with ambiguities.” Underneath all the social and religious explanations, “a fundamental emotional fact exerts its shaping pressure on iconography and ritual concept: eros.”

Her last sentence sets up the next move:

Odi et amo intersect; there is the core and symbol of eros, in the space across which desire reaches.

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Chapter 5: The Reach

Carson opens with a line of John Donne — “Lest thou thy love and hate and me undoe, / To let mee live, O love and hate mee too” — and then states the law that the chapter will obey: “A space must be maintained or desire ends.”

To prove it, she goes back to Sappho. Where fragment 31 mapped the triangle, fragment 105a is “a small, perfect photograph of the erotic dilemma.” It is thought to come from a wedding song, since the rhetorician Himerios mentions Sappho likening a girl to an apple. Carson prints it:

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch, high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot — well, no they didn’t forget — were not able to reach…

Then she begins to read it the way you would examine a photograph held to the light. “The poem is incomplete, perfectly.” There is one sentence with no main verb and no main subject. There is one simile whose point never appears, because the comparandum — the bride, presumably — never arrives. “If there is a bride, she stays inaccessible. It is her inaccessibility that is present.”

Everything in the poem is reaching. The apple “exerts a powerful attraction, both grammatical and erotic, on all that follows; but completion is not achieved — grammatical or erotic. Desiring hands close on empty air in the final infinitive, while the apple of their eye dangles perpetually inviolate two lines above.”

The reach is staged at every level of craft. The poet’s eye reaches for the apple, and the apple is moved further away in the same breath: “on a high branch” becomes “high on the highest branch.” The mind reaches to explain why — the applepickers forgot — and corrects itself in stride: well, no they didn’t forget — were unable to reach. Each line “launches an impression that is at once modified, then launched again.” The Greek syllables themselves reach after one another from line to line ( akrō … akron … akrotatō ; lelathonto … eklelathont’ ). The rhythm corroborates: dactyls in the first two lines slow to spondees in the third “as the apple begins to look farther and farther away.”

Carson’s most beautiful move here is metrical. She points out that each verse “applies corrective measures to its own units of sound.” The first line has two examples of correption , a license that shortens a long vowel before a following vowel but lets it stay in hiatus — the syllables “move and rustle against one another, as the tree is thick with branches over which your eye climbs steadily to the topmost one.” Lines 2 and 3 use the brusquer device of elision , which simply expels the first vowel. Line 3 has three elisions in a row. Carson reads correption and elision as “tactics to restrain a unit of sound from reaching beyond its proper position in the rhythm.” Then she lets the analogy come to the surface: “one might think of correption as a sort of metrical décolletage, in contrast to elision, which bundles the too tempting vowel quite out of sight.” Line 3 crops the applepickers’ hands in midair.

Three of the five elisions land on the same little word — epi — a preposition meaning “motion to, toward, for, in quest of, reaching after.” Carson calls it the ardent preposition, and notes that its action “shapes the poem on every level.” In sound, in rhythm, in thought, in narrative content, in its likely occasion as an epithalamium, “this poem acts out the experience of eros.”

The poem ends as she began the book — glukupikron. “Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger.” From this small inchoate fragment, Carson gives us a working definition to carry forward:

The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time).

Chapter 6: Finding the Edge

Carson opens this short transition chapter with a single, load-bearing claim: “Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do.” All the intervals she has been tracking — between reach and grasp, glance and counterglance, “I love you” and “I love you too” — are aftershocks of one primary boundary, the one “of flesh and self between you and me.” Desire is the experience of pressing against that boundary and noticing, for the first time, that it is there.

Her image for how this awareness forms is startlingly plain. Infants, she says, begin to see by noticing the edges of things. How do they know an edge is an edge? “By passionately wanting it not to be.” Wanting the edge away is the same act as registering that the edge exists. By extension: “It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.” Eros, then, is an education in one’s own contour. The lover reaches outward, hits the limit, ricochets back, and only now sees the self that was doing the reaching — and sees it as holed, incomplete, “a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me.”

This is the move Carson will spend the next three chapters refining. Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium — humans as halved spheres rolling around in search of their missing half — is the popular version, and Carson registers its appeal (“most people find something disturbingly lucid and true” in it) while flagging that Aristophanes is a comic poet. For something more serious, she says, we have to listen to how lovers actually reason. And a feature of that reasoning will at once strike us: “It is outrageous.”

The chapter ends on that cliffhanger. The edge has been named; now the logic built on top of it can be dismantled.

Chapter 7: Logic at the Edge

Carson’s epigraph here is from Augustine, and it does half the work before the chapter even begins: “with one impulse of the heart we only just grazed it — and sighing left the first fruits of our spirit there and came back to the sound of our human tongue where words have beginnings and endings.” Grazing, leaving part of yourself behind, falling back into a tongue whose words have edges — the whole chapter is compressed into those lines.

She then gives a roll call of the Greek lyric inventory of what Eros does to a body. It is worth quoting at length, because the cumulative force is the point:

“A hole is being gnawed in [my] vitals” says Sappho (LP, fr. 96.16–17). “You have snatched the lungs out of my chest” (West, IEG 191) and “pierced me right through the bones” (193) says Archilochos. “You have worn me down” (Alkman 1.77 PMG), “grated me away” (Ar., Eccl. 956), “devoured my flesh” (Ar., Ran. 66), “sucked my blood” (Theokritos 2.55), “mowed off my genitals” (?Archilochos, West, IEG 99.21), “stolen my reasoning mind” (Theognis 1271).

Her summary judgement is blunt: “Eros is expropriation.” He robs the body of limbs, substance, integrity; “the lover is the loser.” Even the birth of Aphrodite in Hesiod is castration: the foam around Ouranos’ severed genitals. Love does not happen without loss of vital self.

The outrageous reckoning

“Or so he reckons,” Carson adds. And now she names the sleight of hand. The lover, reaching for an object outside himself, is provoked to notice his own limits; from that new vantage — “which we might call selfconsciousness” — he looks back and sees a hole. Where did the hole come from? “It comes from the lover’s classificatory process. Desire for an object that he never knew he lacked is defined, by a shift of distance, as desire for a necessary part of himself. Not a new acquisition but something that was always, properly, his.” Two lacks — the missing object, the hole in the lover — are rolled into one.

Carson draws the geometry out: the lover’s exegesis opens three angles (lover, beloved, lover-redefined-as-incomplete), then collapses the triangle into “a two-sided figure” and treats the two sides as one circle. “‘Seeing my hole, I know my whole,’” the lover says to himself. His reasoning suspends him in a pun.

The pun as the lover’s native language

It is, Carson insists, literally impossible to talk about erotic lack without falling into puns. Her case study is Plato’s Lysis, where Sokrates tries to define philos (both “loving” and “loved,” both “friendly” and “dear”). He steers the two boys into agreeing that desire is longing for “that which properly belongs to the desirer but has been lost or taken away somehow.” The engine of the slippage is the Greek word oikeios, which means both “suitable, related, akin to myself” and “belonging to me, properly mine.” Sokrates, addressing Lysis and Menexenos, slides smoothly between the two:

“Desire and love and longing are directed at that which is akin to oneself [tou oikeiou], it seems. So if you two are loving friends [philoi] of one another then in some natural way you belong to one another [oikeioi esth’].” (221e)

Carson’s verdict: “It is profoundly unjust of Sokrates to slip from one meaning of oikeios to another, as if it were the same thing to recognize in someone else a kindred soul and to claim that soul as your own possession.” And yet “all the lover’s reasoning and hopes of happiness are built upon this injustice, this claim, this blurred distinction.”

She pauses here and asks what a pun even is: “a figure of language that depends on similarity of sound and disparity of meaning. It matches two sounds that fit perfectly together as aural shapes yet stand insistently, provocatively apart in sense. You perceive homophony and at the same time see the semantic space that separates the two words. Sameness is projected onto difference in a kind of stereoscopy.” The pun’s allure is identical to the lover’s allure. “Like eros, puns flout the edges of things.” Inside a pun you glimpse “a better truth, a truer meaning” than either word holds on its own — but “the glimpse of that enhanced meaning, which flashes past in a pun, is a painful thing. For it is inseparable from your conviction of its impossibility. Words do have edges. So do you.”

The vision of the enlarged self

What the pun shows in miniature, the lover sees in full. “When he inhales Eros, there appears within him a sudden vision of a different self, perhaps a better self, compounded of his own being and that of his beloved.” For a moment, this vision feels uniquely true — “more truly your own, won from reality at personal cost.” “A gust of godlikeness may pass through you and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible and present.”

Then, in a line that functions as the chapter’s hinge: “Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.”

Neville in the garden

Carson imports Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as a modern comparandum. Neville watches Bernard approach across a garden:

“Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend.… Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody — with whom? — with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?” (83)

Neville is quieter than the Greek lyric poets — he does not panic about his stolen lungs, does not even reach for puns — but he performs the same trigonometry. Desire leaves Neville, ricochets off Bernard, returns to “not the same Neville.” Bernard, in Sokrates’ word, has become oikeios. Woolf even supplies the Carsonian summary: “To be contracted by another person into a single being — how strange.”

Carson folds in Freud (the infantile split into “mine”/“not mine” that forms the self) and Bruno Snell’s “discovery of the mind” — the thesis that archaic Greek self-consciousness was born precisely at the bittersweet moment, glukupikron, when eros is blocked. Snell: “the sparks of a vital desire burst into flame at the very moment when the desire is blocked in its path. It is the obstruction which makes the wholly personal feelings conscious.” The self is something you notice when desire runs into a wall.

Chapter 8: Losing the Edge

“The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.” That sentence opens the third movement, and it is the whole argument in a breath. Once you know you have an edge, the next question is what to do about it — and not every lover answers the same way.

Neville, again, is merely puzzled: “How curiously one is changed.” Nietzsche is ecstatic: “One seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more complete; one is more complete.… the lover is worth more.” The feeling of being more yourself than ever before is, Carson notes, common enough in love, and some people (Nietzsche included) rejoice in it.

The Greek lyric poets do not. “Change of self is loss of self to these poets. Their metaphors for the experience are metaphors of war, disease and bodily dissolution.”

Melting

The image that dominates is melting. Eros is “melter of limbs” (Sappho LP fr. 130; Archilochos, West IEG 196). His glance is “more melting than sleep or death” (Alkman 3 PMG). The lover is wax, dissolving at his touch (Pindar, fr. 123). Is melting a good thing? “That remains ambivalent.” Something sensually delicious, yes; but also something that unmakes you.

To sharpen the stakes, Carson detours through Sartre on stickiness:

“The viscous is a state halfway between solid and liquid.… It is soft, yielding, and compressible. Its stickiness is a trap, it clings like a leech; it attacks the boundary between myself and it. Long columns falling off my fingers suggest my own substance flowing into the pool of stickiness.… But to touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity. Stickiness is clinging, like a too possessive dog or mistress.” (1956, 606–07)

Sartre is “high-pitched” and “all but irrational” in his dismay — and that, Carson says, is exactly the ancient poets’ register too. Alongside melting she lists the full Greek menu: “piercing, crushing, bridling, roasting, stinging, biting, grating, cropping, poisoning, singeing and grinding to a powder.” The cumulative impression is “intense concern for the integrity and control of one’s own body.” “The lover learns as he loses it to value the bounded entity of himself.”

The literacy hypothesis

Here Carson makes her move. Snell stopped at blocked eros as the trigger for Greek self-consciousness. But, she points out, there is another variable he ignored: the Greek lyric poets were also the first authors in our tradition to leave us their poems in written form. Is that a coincidence? “To put the question more pungently, what is erotic about alphabetization?”

It sounds, at first, foolish. She presses on anyway. Lyric poetry and its new sensibility begin for us with Archilochos because Archilochos’ poems came to be written down. There may have been oral Archilochoses before him; we will never know. But the fact that the preserved lyric tradition begins in writing marks a decisive break — not just in what survives, but in “certain radically new conditions of life and mind within which they were operating.” “Oral cultures and literate cultures do not think, perceive or fall in love in the same way.”

The archaic age, she notes, was a time of contraction and focus across every domain: the rise of the polis, the invention of coinage, the lyric poets’ narrowing-in on precise moments of personal life, and — running through it all — the spread of the Phoenician alphabet. An oral self is permeable by design; its survival depends on continuous sensual openness. A literate self learns something new. To read and write, you have to inhibit the input of your senses, “to close or inhibit the input of his senses, to inhibit or control the responses of his body, so as to train energy and thought upon the written words.” This is at first “a laborious and painful effort.” But it produces a new awareness: “the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action.”

Put beside eros, the implication is stark. “For individuals to whom selfpossession has become important, the influx of a sudden, strong emotion from without cannot be an unalarming event.” In an oral milieu the sudden influx was the normal mode; in a literate one it becomes an invasion. “So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him.” The struggle is between a god and his victim, recorded “from within a consciousness — perhaps new in the world — of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.”

Chapter 9: Archilochos at the Edge

All the threads — edge, hole, melting, literacy — tighten around a single surviving fragment. “Archilochos is the first lyric poet whose transmission to us benefited from the literate revolution.” Educated in the oral tradition, he seems to have encountered writing at some point in his career and adapted. And someone — perhaps the poet himself — wrote down this:

τοῖος γὰρ φιλότητος ἔρως ὑπὸ καρδίην ἐλυσθεὶς πολλὴν κατ᾽ ἀχλὺν ὀμμάτων ἔχευεν, κλέψας ἐκ στηθέων ἁπαλὰς φρένας.

Such a longing for love, rolling itself up under my heart, poured down much mist over my eyes, filching out of my chest the soft lungs —

(West, IEG 191)

Carson reads this poem microscopically, almost phoneme by phoneme. The first word, toios (“such”), sets up a grammatical expectation for an answering hoios (“as”) clause that never arrives. The poem is half a sentence. Within that half, though, she argues, “every word, sound and stress is placed for a purpose.”

Line 1 coils erōs “dead center,” surrounded by “a sequence of round o sounds (one long and five short) and bunched consonants (four pairs)” that “gather the tension of the lover’s desire into an audible pressure within him.” The meter starts epic — “an epic burst of dactyls and spondees as eros asserts its presence” — and “then dissolves into a spatter of iambs precisely at the point where desire reaches the lover’s heart (kardiēn).” The last word, the participle elustheis (“rolled up in a ball”), has a deep Homeric echo: “‘Rolled up in a ball under the belly of a ram’ is the mode in which Odysseus escapes the Cyclops’ cave (Od. 9.433). ‘Rolled up in a ball at the feet of Achilles’ is the position from which Priam makes supplication for the body of his son (Il. 24.510).” In both, “a posture of abject vulnerability is assumed by a genuinely powerful person” — and Archilochos places that menace quietly at line-end.

Line 2 wraps the eyes in mist from both sides. Soft, thickened consonants — l, m, n, chi — come down “four times upon word-end in n, as if emphasizing the descent of the fog in four liquid streaks.” A caesura drops between the eyes and their mist. The Homeric ghost is here too: in Homer mist darkens a man’s eyes at the moment of death.

Line 3 finishes the ambush. “One quick theft whistles the lungs straight out of the lover’s chest. Naturally, this ends the poem: with the organ of breath gone, speech is impossible.” The line breaks off in a run of five s-sounds, without completing its metrical scheme. Almost certainly this is a scribal accident — but it is hard not to feel it as fitting.

Why lungs matter

Carson lingers on the last word, phrenes, which she translates as “lungs” but which for the Greeks meant much more. “For the ancient Greeks, breath is consciousness, breath is perception, breath is emotion.” The phrenes are the receptacle of sense impressions, the vehicle for each of the five senses — even vision, since seeing in the archaic worldview involves something breathed in through the eyes from the object seen. Words, thoughts, understanding are both received and produced by the phrenes. Theognis:

The eyes and tongue and ears and intelligence of a quick-witted man grow in the middle of his chest. (1163–64)

This makes sense, Carson says, in an oral world. In such a world, “space and the distances between things are not of first importance.” What matters is continuity. Empedokles’ doctrine of aporrhoai — tiny emanations constantly breathed in and out through every pore by every living thing — is the physics of an oral universe: “a universe where the spaces between things are ignored and the interactions constant. Breath is everywhere. There are no edges.”

Eros is the breath of desire. Winged, he moves love in and out of creatures at will. The same Greek word, peithō, covers both erotic seduction and rhetorical persuasion; the same goddess presides over seducer and poet. An oral listener, in Fränkel’s phrase, is “an open force-field” into whom sound is continuously breathed. Eros and the Muses share an apparatus.

What the written word does

Written words are different. “Literacy desensorializes words and reader.” A reader has to shut off nose, ear, tongue and skin to concentrate. A written text “separates words from one another, separates words from the environment, separates words from the reader (or writer) and separates the reader (or writer) from his environment. Separation is painful.” Epigraphy’s slow, halting development of word-division is evidence of how alien this separation first felt.

Heard words may have no edges; Homer’s word for “word,” epos, can mean speech, tale, song, line of verse, or epic whole — anything breathable. “The edges are irrelevant.” But edge has everything to do with Archilochos. “His words stop in mid-breath.” As Werner Jaeger put it, a poet like Archilochos “has learnt how to express in his own personality the whole objective world and its laws, to represent them in himself.” Carson translates: “From the flesh out, it seems, Archilochos understands the law differentiating self from not-self, for Eros cuts into him just at the point where that difference lies.”

Breaks make a person think

Lyric, Carson argues, is epic broken into smaller shapes. “The sweep of epic narrative contracts upon a moment of emotion; the cast of characters is pared down to one ego; the poetic eye enters its subject in a single beam.” Diction and meter fracture: Homeric formulas survive but appear “broken apart and differently assembled in irregular shapes and joins.” We saw Archilochos do this in fragment 191 — fastening dactylic to iambic units so that Eros hits the heart exactly where the epic tetrameter collapses into iambic dismay.

“Breaks interrupt time and change its data.… Breaks make a person think.” When you contemplate the spaces between the letters of “I love you” on a page, you may find yourself contemplating other spaces — the space between “you” in the text and you in life. Both spaces are acts of symbolization. Both require the mind to reach from what is actual to something glimpsed in the imagination. “In letters as in love, to imagine is to address oneself to what is not.” To write a word is to put a symbol in place of an absent sound. To write “I love you” is to perform a further, more painful substitution. The beloved’s absence from the syntax of one’s life “is not a fact to be changed by written words.” And it is the one fact that matters. “You and I are not one.”

The block ends on a sentence that does all the work its predecessors have been sharpening for: “Archilochos steps off the edge of that fact into extreme solitude.”

Chapter 10: Alphabetic Edge

Carson now performs the move that the whole book has been saving for. She turns to the Greek alphabet, and asks what is so special about it.

The answer, on the technical side, is small and decisive. Other writing systems existed in the ancient world — Assyrian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Phoenician syllabary the Greeks borrowed and altered. What the Greeks did, sometime in the early eighth century B.C., is usually summarized as “introducing the vowels.” Carson finds that summary inadequate. The real conceptual leap was the breaking apart of the syllable into its acoustic components. Before, every sign stood for a syllable — a consonant plus some unspecified vowel that the reader supplied from context. After, sign and sound were cut clean. A “t” was a “t.”

She quotes a historian who states the philosophical scandal of this:

What must be stressed is that the act which created the alphabet is an idea, an act of intellect which, so far as signs for the independent consonants are concerned, is also an act of abstraction from anything an ear can hear or a voice say. For the pure consonant (t, d, k or whatever) is unpronounceable without adding to it some suggestion of vocalic breath… The Greek sign, and this for the first time in the history of writing, stands for an abstraction, the isolated consonant.

This is the wedge. A consonant, by itself, makes no sound — Plato calls them voiceless. They are pure starts and stops. They are the things that mark where a sound begins and where a sound ends. They are, in Carson’s phrasing, the edges of sound.

Consonants mark the edges of sound. The erotic relevance of this is clear, for we have seen that eros is vitally alert to the edges of things and makes them felt by lovers. As eros insists upon the edges of human beings and of the spaces between them, the written consonant imposes edge on the sounds of human speech and insists on the reality of that edge, although it has its origin in the reading and writing imagination.

The technology trains the perception. To learn this alphabet is to learn to slice the continuous noise of speech into bounded units. Carson worries the analogy might sound fanciful to modern readers, and concedes that we have been blunted by habit: we read too much, write too poorly, and remember too little of how strange and laborious it was to learn letters in the first place. So she goes looking for ancient evidence that the Greeks did not take their alphabet for granted.

She finds it everywhere. Eudora Welty (a modern witness, brought in for warmth) confesses her childhood love affair with illuminated capitals — the “O” with a rabbit running it like a treadmill, the gold of the Book of Kells. Pythagoras, according to a scholiast, “took pains over the beauty of letters, forming each stroke with a geometrical rhythm of angles and curves and straight lines.” Children in Plato’s Protagoras learn to write by tracing faintly drawn outlines with a stylus, and Carson lingers on the affective weight of this:

To anyone trained in this way the edges of letters are memorable, emotional places, and remain so.

Then a remarkable scrap from Euripides’ lost Theseus: an illiterate man stares at a ship and reads its name aloud by describing the shapes — “a circle marked out as it were with a compass… two strokes and then another one keeping them apart in the middle… curly like a lock of hair…” He is spelling out ΘΗΣΕΥΣ as a sequence of geometrical objects. Two other tragedians imitated the scene. Sophokles staged a satyr-play in which an actor danced the alphabet. The comic Kallias produced something called “The Alphabetic Revue” in which the chorus performed the letters and mimed syllables by pairing vowels with consonants. The audience for such theatre, Carson notes, is one whose imaginations could be seized by the spectacle of letters taking shape in the air “as if they were real.”

She follows the edge into the materials. Through the sixth century the Greeks wrote boustrophēdon — back and forth, like an ox plowing a field, letters reversing direction line by line. This presupposes “a pictorial conception of the letters as outlined figures which can be turned in either direction.” Inscriptions mark word divisions with little stacked columns of dots. Lines of text alternate red and black. Epigraphists shrug and call it “some aesthetic attraction.” Carson tightens the diagnosis:

But we should take note of the particular mode of the aesthetic. In writing, beauty prefers an edge.

Even the writing implement carries the argument. Egyptians wrote with a chewed rush, painting their hieroglyphs in a soft, ragged band of ink. Greeks invented the kalamos, the split reed pen, which produces a fine, demarcated line. A papyrologist warns that if the hand pauses for a moment, “a little round blob of ink collects” — the pen punishes hesitation at the edges. “Expertise tells, at the edge: there is the juncture of a writer’s pleasure, risk and pain.”

Carson then steps back to name the deeper claim. The Greek alphabet is a phonetic system that does not symbolize objects in the world; it symbolizes the activity of constructing speech. The consonant is the theoretic element, the abstraction. To use a consonant is to perform an act of imagination — the mind reaches out from what is physically present (a stroke of ink) to something that is not physically there (a pure starting-and-stopping that no ear can hear). The chapter closes on a quiet, pivot-line that points the rest of the book forward:

I am writing this book because that act astounds me. It is an act in which the mind reaches out from what is present and actual to something else. The fact that eros operates by means of an analogous act of imagination will soon be seen to be the most astounding thing about eros.

The literate self, the one trained to feel edges where the ear hears continuous noise, is the eroticizable self.

Chapter 11: What Does the Lover Want from Love?

The chapter opens with Stendhal: “My astonishing victory over Menti did not give me a pleasure one-hundredth part as intense as the pain she gave me when she left me for M. de Rospiec.” That sets the question as a trap. The obvious answer to “what does the lover want?” — the beloved — is wrong, and the wrongness has been visible from the start.

Carson returns to Sappho’s fragment 31. Up close, the beloved is unbearable; union would be annihilating. What Sappho actually wants, in the poem, is to be like the man sitting opposite — the one who can face the beloved and not be destroyed. That ideal-impassive self is glimpsed only because the triangle of Sappho, beloved, and listener flashes the difference into view for an instant.

As the planes of vision jump, the actual self and the ideal self and the difference between them connect in one triangle momentarily. The connection is eros. To feel its current pass through her is what the lover wants.

The action of eros, Carson reminds us, is to reach. Reaching is an activity of the imagination, and erotic theorists have circled this point for centuries. She walks a brief gallery of witnesses. Homer withholds any description of Helen and lets the old men of Troy whisper that no one could blame the suffering — Helen survives as universally desired because she is universally imaginable. Aristotle defines desire as orexis, a reaching for the sweet, performed via phantasia, imagination. Andreas Capellanus insists love’s suffering “does not arise out of any action … but only from the cogitation of the mind upon what it sees.” Stendhal names the projective process “crystallization,” after the bare branch thrown into the salt mines of Salzburg and pulled out months later studded with diamonds — the original twig is no longer recognizable. Kierkegaard credits Don Juan’s power to a “sensuously idealizing power” that beautifies the desired object by reflection. Freud names the same thing transference, the mischief by which an analysand falls in love with the deliberately aloof analyst, “concocting in this way a love object out of thin air.”

The novelists confirm the pattern. Anna Karenina searches Vronsky’s face to compare it with the Vronsky of her imagination — “incomparably superior, and impossible in reality.” Emma Bovary writes love letters to Rodolphe and finds herself addressing instead “a phantom composed of her most passionate memories, her most enjoyable books, and her strongest desires.” Calvino’s heroine in The Nonexistent Knight can only desire the title character — an empty suit of armour — because everyone else is too knowable.

Carson lands the move:

That which is known, attained, possessed, cannot be an object of desire.

Then a stranger, more delicate image from Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness. The novelist Oki marries Fumiko, who types his manuscripts. His fascination with her is bound up in the gap he sees between the handwritten page and the printed one, between cursive and typeface. As he gets used to that gap his passion fades, and he takes a mistress. Carson gathers the examples into a single sentence:

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.

She borrows Aristotle’s definition of delight as a movement, kinēsis, of the soul, and presses it into her formula: “No difference: no movement. No Eros.”

What the spark illuminates is a self. The lover, in the flash, sees something about himself that he had not seen before — usually a lack, a hole. The Greek poets, Carson notes, register this almost always as pain. Modern lovers can take it differently; she nods to Virginia Woolf’s Neville quietly recording “Something now leaves me,” and to Nietzsche’s elated affirmations. But “Nietzsche calls the modern world an ass that says yes to everything.” The Greeks do not say yes. They concede the sweetness — gluku — and they divinize the ideal possibilities of selfhood by personifying them as the god Eros. They do not, though, exult in a successful incorporation of those possibilities into the actual self. Eros prints in the negative.

This sets up the question that gives the chapter its title. Suppose the lover could recover all his lacks and become whole — would that be what he wants? Carson stages this as a scene from Plato’s Symposium. Aristophanes, mid-myth, brings two lovers locked in an embrace before the god Hephaistos, who appears with his blacksmith tools and offers to weld them into a single being for life and beyond death:

“If that is your craving, I am ready to melt you together and fuse you into a single unit, so that two become one and as long as you live you may both, as one, live a common life, and when you die you may also, down there in Hades, one instead of two, die a common death. Consider whether this is what you desire, whether it would satisfy you to obtain this.”

Aristophanes does not let the lovers answer. He answers for them: “No lover could want anything else.”

Carson refuses the verdict. Two reservations. First, Hephaistos — “impotent cuckold of the Olympian pantheon” — is a poor authority on what lovers want. Second, Aristophanes’ own myth contradicts him. The original round beings of his fantasy did not roll about in contented oneness; they got big ideas and tried to roll up to Olympus to take on the gods. They began reaching for something else.

So much for oneness. It is not the number ‘one,’ as we have seen in example after example, to which the lover’s mind inclines when he is given a chance to express his desire.

The lover’s delight is in reaching, and reaching for something perfect would be perfect delight. Sappho’s apple still dangling unpicked at the top of the highest branch — fragment 105a — is the icon of this fact. The chapter closes with Carson stating, as cleanly as she has yet, what eros actually does:

They are tactics of imagination, which sometimes turn upon enhancing the beloved, sometimes upon reconceiving the lover, but which are all aimed at defining one certain edge or difference: an edge between two images that cannot merge in a single focus because they do not derive from the same level of reality — one is actual, one is possible. To know both, keeping the difference visible, is the subterfuge called eros.

The two chapters meet here. The alphabet teaches the mind to feel the edges of sound; eros teaches it to feel the edge between what is and what could be. Both are technologies of the imagination, and from now on the book will treat them as the same technology.

Chapter 12: Symbolon

The second cycle of the book begins where the first ended, but with the camera pulled back. Carson confesses that the early chapters were, by her own admission, shallow — they took Sappho’s glukupikron at face value, putting “sweet” first because Eros’ sweetness is obvious, then turning dutifully to the bitter side. That tidy two-step now looks insufficient. Sweetness and bitterness are not two flavors of the same fruit; they are the same act, viewed from two angles, and they both belong to something larger than love. They belong to thinking.

“There would seem to be some resemblance between the way Eros acts in the mind of a lover and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker… I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them. They are not like anything else, but they are like each other.”

Reaching is the shared verb. Aristotle’s opening line of the Metaphysics — “All men by their very nature reach out to know” — is the hinge. To know and to want are both gestures across a gap. Homer already saw it: the same verb, mnaomai, means “to have in mind” and “to court, to woo.” The thinker stands at the edge of what he knows; the lover stands at the edge of what he is. Both lean across.

Carson then walks us into Velazquez’s Las Meninas. The king and queen are being painted, but they are not in the painting — or rather, they are, faintly, in a small mirror at the back of the room. The eyes of every figure in the painting look outward, which means they look at the king and queen, which means they look at where we are standing. For a heartbeat we think they are looking at us. Then we see the mirror. Then we see that the place we occupy is also their place. We are nowhere in particular, and we are standing at a blind point.

“We cannot see that point, as we cannot think thought or desire desire, except by a subterfuge.”

Foucault, whom Carson borrows here, calls the painting’s mirror “a metathesis of visibility” — a piece of artifice that almost lets us see ourselves looking. Almost. The angle keeps slipping. The point splits each time we try to focus it. It is not a noun. “That point is a verb. Each time we look at it, it acts.”

Hold that, she says, and look at another such point. Metaphor.

A metaphor takes two things that don’t belong together and forces a sentence to mean both at once. The literal sense doesn’t disappear; it stays, in tension with the new sense the metaphor produces. Critics have words for this — “stereoscopic vision,” “split reference,” Ricoeur’s “state of war wherein the mind has not yet reached conceptual peace.” The mind is held between sameness and difference and not allowed to rest in either. Aristotle, characteristically, names the moment of pleasure inside this tension: ti paradoxon, “something paradoxical,” the little jolt when the mind catches itself saying, “Well how true! I was quite wrong after all!”

That same jolt, Carson says, lives at the center of Eros. The lover is arrested 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.” We are not the king and queen of Spain. We are not lovers who can both feel and attain their desires. We are not poets who need no metaphor to carry our meaning across.

And so the chapter arrives, finally, at its title. The Greek symbolon was a small practical thing: a knucklebone or potsherd broken in half, one half kept by each of two parties, so that years later — across distances, across generations — they could be matched and identity confirmed. The two halves together compose one meaning. A metaphor is a kind of symbolon. So is a lover. Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium:

“Each one of us is but the symbolon of a human being — sliced in half like a flatfish, two instead of one — and each pursues a neverending search for the symbolon of himself.”

Every lover, Carson writes, is “half of a knucklebone, wooer of a meaning that is inseparable from its absence.” The moment of recognition — when we see ourselves projected on the screen of what we could be — is always a wrench. We love it and we hate it. We have to keep going back to it, because that’s the only way to stay in contact with the possible. But going back also means watching it disappear again. Only a god’s word has no beginning or end. Only a god’s desire reaches without lack. Eros, the paradoxical god, is exception to all rules: “neverendingly filled with lack itself.” Sappho, says Maximus of Tyre, drew the whole conception together in one word. Glukupikron.

Chapter 13: A Novel Sense

A short bridge chapter that opens a new line of inquiry. Carson has spent the first half of the book inside lyric poetry — Sappho, Anakreon, Theognis, the epigrams. The lyric poets, she argues, “made triangles with their words.” They took situations that ought to involve two factors (lover, beloved) and rendered them as three (lover, beloved, the space between). She has shown that this triangulation isn’t a quirk of the lyric imagination — Homer has it, the tragedians have it, Plato has it. Something essential to eros is being caught.

But the lyric poets, she now wants to point out, were themselves caught in a particular historical moment: they lived in the first burst of literary activity after the Greek alphabet arrived. They composed for oral performance but also wrote things down. They were “poets exploring the edge between oral and literate procedure, probing forward to see what kind of thing writing is, reading is, poetry can be.”

So a new question opens up. We’ve asked what the lover wants from love. What about the reader? What does the reader want from reading? What is the writer’s desire?

“Novels are the answer.”

Specifically — and this is where a one-line gloss is useful — the Greek romance novels: prose fictions written in the Hellenistic and Roman world, from roughly the third century B.C. through the fourth century A.D., almost all of them love stories about a couple separated by improbable disasters and reunited on the last page. Four survive in full (Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Heliodoros, and Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe), with fragments of others. Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe is the earliest. Chariton himself called the genre erōtika pathēmata — “erotic sufferings.” The name is honest. It is generically required that love be painful.

Carson quotes a lovely 1917 summary by an editor named Gaselee, which catalogues the form’s machinery: lovers fall in love or get married and are immediately separated, “sundered time and again by the most improbable misfortunes,” face death in every form, attract the wicked attention of rivals, occasionally pause for a description of a place or scene, and “on the last page all is cleared up… and the happy pair is united for ever with the prospect of a long and prosperous life before them.”

What the novel does, Carson says, is take the triangular tactics the lyric poets discovered and operate them at scale, “prosaically and in extenso.” The lovers themselves do most of the obstructing — should pirates, parents, doctors, graverobbers, slaves, divinities, and the whims of chance not suffice. Aidōs (the archaic ethic of “shamefastness,” now narrowed to chastity) functions as the favorite stratagem, falling like a veil between lovers whenever passion is within reach. One critic has named the resulting condition “Aphrodisian chastity”: a pleasing torment in which Aphrodite is both patron and enemy, designing the desire and then designing every obstacle to it.

There is, in other words, a paradox built into the structure of the novel itself. The lovers want to consummate their desire. If they do, the novel ends. The novelist, who as a writer wants the story to end, must keep subverting that aim in order to have a story to write. The reader is implicated in the same bind:

“‘But not yet!’ say the readers to the writer. ‘But not yet!’ says the writer to his hero and heroine. ‘But not yet!’ says the beloved to the lover. And so the reach of desire continues.”

What is a paradox? Carson lets Zeno answer. Zeno’s runner never reaches the end of the stadium; Zeno’s Achilles never overtakes the tortoise; Zeno’s arrow never hits the target. Each paradox is “an argument against the reality of reaching an end.” Each contains a point where the reasoning seems to fold into itself and disappear, then begins again. If you enjoy reasoning, you are delighted to begin again — but enjoyment of reasoning entails some wish to arrive somewhere, so the delight has an edge of chagrin. “In the bittersweetness of the exercise we see the outline of eros. You love Zeno and you hate him.”

The novel, she says, gives us a broader access to the same blind point we glimpsed in Las Meninas and at the heart of metaphor — broader because it sustains the paradox over hundreds of pages, with many ruses. The next chapters will look at those ruses.

Chapter 14: Something Paradoxical

Critics of the Greek novel, Carson notes, have found paradox to be “a principle of the genre.” The romances are full of moments described as kainos (new and strange), paralogos (against reason), adokētos (unthought of). Techniques of paradox saturate plot, imagery, and wordplay. This continuity with the lyric poets is exact: “I’m crazy! I’m not crazy! I’m in love! I’m not in love!” cries Anakreon. “I don’t know what I should do. Two states of mind in me…” says Sappho. The novelists take these flashes of emotional schism and stretch them into full soliloquies. A character debates his erotic dilemma with himself, at length and to no purpose.

But the schism isn’t reserved for the lovers. It’s contagious. It spreads to the bystanders inside the text and to the readers outside it. Watch the crowd at the end of Xenophon’s Ephesiaca: as the heroine Anthia falls into her lover’s arms, the townspeople feel “pleasure, pain, fear, memory of the past, apprehension of the future, all mixing in their souls.” Watch the citizens at the end of Heliodoros’s Aethiopica:

“absolute contrarieties were fitted together as one sound: joy interwoven with grief, tears mixed with laughter, total gloom turning into festive delight…”

Heliodoros has another character, Calasiris, witness the heroine’s suffering earlier in the same novel and report:

“at the same time I was filled with pleasure and pain: I found myself in quite a novel state of mind [pathos ti kainoteron] weeping and rejoicing simultaneously…”

A novel state of mind. Carson lets the phrase sit. We are meant, as readers, to feel exactly this. Chariton turns to us at a high point of his plot and addresses us directly:

“What poet ever produced such a paradoxical scenario [paradoxon mython] on the stage? You must have thought you were sitting in the theater filled with a thousand emotions, all at the same time: tears, joy, amazement, pity, disbelief, fervent prayers!”

To create pleasure and pain at once is the novelist’s aim. And the mechanism, Carson argues, is structural. The reader stands in a privileged position. We know the story will end happily. The characters do not. So we hover at an angle to the text from which two levels of narrative reality float one upon another without converging — what is happening, and what the characters believe is happening. This is exactly the stereoscopic moment Sappho built in fragment 31, the three-point circuit that joined her, the beloved, and “the man who listens closely.” Only there it was momentary, a sudden vertigo. In the novel, that shift of distance becomes the permanent attitude from which we view the action.

“Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.”

Chapter 15: My Page Makes Love

Now an example. Longus, writing Daphnis and Chloe in the second or third century A.D., opens his novel with a conceit that is also a confession of method. He explains that he was moved to write because he once encountered “a painted image of the history of Eros” so beautiful it transcended all the actual beauty of the woods and waters around it. Longing — pothos — seized him to “create a rival image in writing.” So he wrote the novel.

Carson breaks the conceit into three components: the painted icon (an existing image of ideal beauty), the verbal icon (the novel itself, reaching to rival it), and the pothos between them, the desire that drags one toward the other across the screen of imagination. The structure is the structure of metaphor. Two heterogeneous images held close by an act of imagination, composing one meaning that comes alive only in the gap between them.

“Longus’ imaginative effort, like the verbal innovation that we call metaphor, is an erotic action, reaching out from what is known and present to something else, something different, something desired. The meaning he composes is a dynamic meaning, not a still point, that comes alive as the novel shifts from plane to plane of its various triangles.”

We are invited into this experience. We stand on the edge of other people’s desire, “arrested, wooed, triangulated and changed by a series of marks on a piece of paper.” Then Carson hands us the chapter’s title, in a quotation from Montaigne:

“My Page makes love, and understands it feelingly.”

Longus’s page makes love to the reader. On the surface, by drawing us into the lovers’ bittersweet emotion. But the surface is just narrative voyeurism. The deeper act of love is in the metaphorical undertaking itself — setting one icon against another and asking the reader’s mind to hold both.

To show how the page itself flirts with you, Carson zooms in on a single scene. Daphnis has just won his father’s consent to marry Chloe. He rushes out to find her, and the lovers wander into an orchard whose trees have been picked clean. All except one:

“There stood one apple tree whose apples had all been gathered. It had neither fruit nor leaf. All the boughs were bare. And a single apple floated on the very top of the topmost boughs: big and beautiful and more fragrant in itself than many others. The applepicker was afraid to go up so high, or he overlooked it. And perhaps that beautiful apple was saving itself for a shepherd in love.”

Daphnis wants to climb. Chloe forbids him. Daphnis climbs anyway. Then he hands her the apple with a small speech:

“O maiden, beautiful seasons begot this apple, a beautiful tree nourished it in the ripening sun and fortune kept close watch. Having eyes, I could not let it be — it might have fallen to the ground and been trampled by grazing flocks or poisoned by some creeping creature or used up by Time as it waited there, gazed at, object of praise. This was the prize Aphrodite won for beauty, this I give to you as victory-prize.”

He drops the apple in her lap, she kisses him, “and so Daphnis repented not at all of having dared to go up so high.”

What is happening here, Carson asks, is layered. The high apple on the highest branch is borrowed straight from Sappho (fragment 105a) — the one the apple-pickers couldn’t reach, “or rather, they did not forget — they were not able to reach.” Apples are the standard love-gift in Greek poetry and visual art. Apples are sacred to Aphrodite, and Daphnis’s mention of the goddess winning the prize for beauty pulls the whole judgment of Paris into the orchard. The apple may also stand for Chloe herself — blooming in the wild, soon to be plucked for marriage. The roles are stereotypical: irrepressible desire meets adamant resistance, he insists, she submits, the apple is the loser. Underneath all this symbolic freight, “it is a real apple and wins a real kiss, or so we read.”

Then Carson does something strange and lovely: she looks even closer, at a single verb. Longus says the apple was epeteto on the tree — from petomai, “to fly.” The verb usually describes creatures with wings or emotions that swoop through the heart. Sappho had used it in fragment 31 to say that eros “puts the heart in my chest on wings.” Longus puts the verb in the imperfect tense, which expresses continuity. Which means, Carson writes, “like the arrow in Zeno’s paradox, the apple flies while standing still.”

And there is a second strangeness, in the grammar. The sentence “and one apple was floating” is connected to what comes before by a simple kai, “and.” But the previous three sentences have insisted that the tree was picked clean, every branch bare. And an apple floats. Translators reflexively change Longus’s and to a but, smoothing the contradiction into an adversative clause. Longus’s aim is not so ordinary.

“His grammar intercepts your complacent purview and splits it in half. On the one hand, you see a tree picked bare. On the other hand, an apple floats. ‘And’ the relation between them is something paradoxical. Longus’ ‘and’ places you at a blind point from which you see more than is literally there.”

Longus is making demands. Your knowledge as you read isn’t just “things will end well.” It includes the whole history of erotic topoi and grammatical attentiveness available to a literate audience. He is putting you through a sustained experience of the mental register — metaphor — that most closely approximates eros. As you read, your mind shifts between the level of characters and episodes and the level of ideas and exegesis. The shifting is delightful and painful at once. Each shift loses something. Exegesis disrupts pure absorption; the narrative tugs you back from exegesis. Your mind refuses to let go of either, and is held, arrested, between the two. They compose one meaning.

“The novelist who constructs this moment of emotional and cognitive interception is making love, and you are the object of his wooing.”

The chapter closes with one more line, from a different hell entirely, where another reader was once seduced by another book:

“‘The book and its author was our pimp!’ cries Francesca in hell, or so we read in the Inferno.”

Chapter 16: Letters, Letters

Carson begins with a useful Greek pun. Grammata means both letters of the alphabet and epistles — the marks on a page and the messages those marks compose. Novels traffic in both kinds, and both kinds run the same erotic circuit. The novel-as-written-text holds the reader in a triangle with the writer and the characters; epistles inside the plot hold lover, beloved, and a third party in the same shape. “When letters are read in novels, the immediate consequence is to inject paradox into lover’s emotions (pleasure and pain at once) and into their strategies (now obstructed by an absent presence).”

Notice the rule she draws from the ancient novelists: letters never carry a direct declaration between lover and beloved. They always stand at an angle. “A writes to C about B, or B reads a letter from C in the presence of A.” The letter is a third person — witness, judge, conduit — and its appearance bends a two-term scene into a three-term one.

Her first specimen is Achilles Tatius’s Clitophon and Leucippe. The hero, believing his beloved dead, is on the verge of marrying another woman when a letter from Leucippe arrives. He breaks off the wedding to read it; the letter brings her “before the eyes of his soul” and floods his cheek with shame “as if he had been caught in the very act of adultery.” He sits down at once to write back, and his opening line is the geometry of the whole genre in one sentence: “Hail, my lady Leucippe. I am miserable in the midst of joy because I see you present and at the same time absent in your letter.” Present and absent. Connective and separative. The letter does what eros does.

The Heliodoros example is stranger and more beautiful. In the Aethiopica, the heroine Charicleia is the white-skinned daughter of the black queen of Ethiopia. The queen exposes the infant rather than face her husband’s suspicions, and wraps her in a tainia — a fillet — inscribed with the explanation. The text isn’t read until the fourth book of the novel, at the moment Charicleia is dying of love. The queen confesses through the headscarf that at the moment her husband penetrated her, she was staring at a painting of Andromeda being claimed naked from the rock by Perseus, and “Her likeness changed my seed — not luckily.”

Carson lingers here because the triangle has unusual depth. Charicleia’s present desire for Theagenes “unfolds backwards in time to include an aesthetic infidelity on the part of her mother.” The queen, mid-coitus, was thinking of someone else — and not even a real someone else, but a mythical pair. She triangulated. Charicleia is the paradox that resulted. White from black on the level of fact; impure from before her birth on the level of inference. “Can a painting change real flesh? Can a metaphor turn reality white?” The question goes nowhere and you keep asking it. The priest who reads the tainia records exactly the readerly state: “I was filled with pleasure and pain: I found myself in quite a novel state of mind, weeping and rejoicing simultaneously.”

Carson is careful to spell out what Heliodoros has done by structuring the scene this way. “Because of the way he has ordered his narrative, it is an act of reading that arrests and complicates the erotic situation … by unfolding a third angle.” Eros works from within a written text. Into its hieratic script you reach for a meaning that “shifts, changes and eludes you, but you continue to long to pursue it, as if it were the beloved itself.”

The third example, a Latin romance called the History of Apollonius of Tyre, is funnier and just as pointed. Apollonius woos the king’s daughter by becoming her tutor; she falls in love with his learning. When suitors crowd in, the king has each one write his name and dowry on a tablet, and sends the tablet to her by Apollonius’s hand. The expected triangle forms — lover, beloved, rivals-in-writing — and then the daughter quietly dismantles it: she writes Apollonius’s name onto the tablet herself and seals it back to her father. Critics have grumbled that the whole letter-passing is an “extraordinary and cumbersome procedure.” Carson disagrees. Letters here “bespeak their own power, a power to change reality erotically.” The heroine, by writing, takes over her own author’s job. “By a shift of distance she reaches from within the plot to triangulate that plot … as if she herself were the novelist, as if letters themselves were an inescapably erotic form of understanding.” And by understanding what she has done, the reader is folded into the same circuit. “As she writes her lover’s name on the tablet, the king’s daughter seduces you.”

Chapter 17: Folded Meanings

This short chapter is about the physical fact of the letter — the thing that hides what it says. Writing, from its first uses, was understood as an apparatus of privacy. A herald shouting in the open square is one kind of communication. A wax tablet folded shut on its hinge, addressed to one reader, is another. Early Greeks felt the difference sharply.

Carson opens with a riddle attributed to Sappho: what creature is female, hides unborn children in her womb, and although those children are voiceless they speak across seas and continents to whomever they wish — but if a stranger stands beside the one reading, he hears nothing? The answer: a letter. The unborn children are the grammata it carries. “Letters make the absent present, and in an exclusive way, as if they were a private code from writer to reader.”

She gives two more figures. Archilochos calls himself a skutalē — the Spartan despatch-staff, where a strip of leather wound around a baton is inscribed across the wrap, then unwound and sent. Only a matching baton at the other end can read it. Communication as “intimate collusion between writer and reader … composing a meaning between them by matching two halves of a text.” Then Aeschylus, in the Suppliants: King Pelasgos contrasts his open spoken decree with the hidden record of writing. His decision “has not been written on tablets nor sealed up in the folds of books, but you hear it plain from a free-speaking tongue.” Words written, Pelasgos implies, “may fold away and disappear.”

And folding was literal. The standard archaic writing surface was the deltos, a hinged wax or wooden tablet that closed on itself after inscription so the words inside were concealed. At Dodona, archaeologists have pulled up about a hundred and fifty narrow lead ribbons inscribed with questions for the oracle of Zeus, each one folded several times to hide the writing inside, the back left blank because no one was meant to see it. “The words you write on your lead at Dodona are a secret between you and the oracle of Zeus.”

Carson takes the literal fact and turns it metaphorical. A folded text holds a private meaning. The reader unfolds it to find a meaning meant only for him. Folding is a form. And the oldest story Greek literature tells about reading and writing is about a folded tablet — Homer’s Bellerophon.

Chapter 18: Bellerophon Is Quite Wrong After All

(A one-line gloss for orientation: in Iliad 6, the young hero Bellerophon is sent abroad carrying a sealed tablet that, unknown to him, asks the recipient to kill the bearer. He delivers his own death warrant. It is the first instance of writing in Greek literature.)

Carson points out something disarming at the start: Homer is not interested in the tablet. The motif “falls so flat here it makes you wonder.” Homer may not have been literate; even if he was, he shows no fascination with the act of writing that sits at the dead center of his own scene. But the structure he transmits is uncannily complete.

The scenario: Bellerophon, beautiful and exiled, takes refuge with King Proitos. Anteia, the king’s wife, falls in love with him and is rebuffed. She triangulates — “by means of a lying tale she inflames her husband to jealousy of Bellerophon.” Proitos, unwilling to kill the young man directly, builds “a kind of deadfall, in which the three angles of eros will close on Bellerophon when actuated by a deadly text.” He sends him to Lykia carrying his own death warrant: Homer says Proitos “bestowed on him a written text that would kill him [sēmata lugra] for he wrote many life-destroying things [thumophthora] on a folded tablet.”

Carson works the words. The “life-destroying things” presumably allege that Bellerophon raped Anteia, which would make Anteia’s imagined triangle into a written fact. (“That fact is a lie but so is any novel; this should not detain us.”) But thumophthora is double-edged. On the surface it means “life-destroying”; it can also mean “heartbreaking,” and so points back to the seductive beauty that made Anteia mad in the first place. “Unwitting wooing began Bellerophon’s story. Unread writing will end it.”

The whole figure is the chapter’s deep hit, and Carson’s sentences are worth quoting at length:

Bellerophon is a living metaphor for the blind point of eros, carrying on his face (beauty) and in his hands (tablet) a meaning he does not decode. The text remains for him a folded one, literally and metaphorically. Unfolded, its two sides compose one meaning, a meaning vitally incongruent with the actual fact of Bellerophon (alive). It is a meaning that is a verb and that will act to assign a new predicate to Bellerophon (dead). It is a meaning whose novel sense will not entirely obscure the previous sense, nor the difference between them (for death keeps life visible while making it absent). The meaning is a blind point where Bellerophon’s knowledge of his own situation disappears into itself.

If he were to unfold the tablet, Carson says, he would exclaim with Aristotle, “Well, I was quite wrong after all!” — the title of the chapter. That moment of recognition would be wrenching. It might also save his life. “We have to keep going back to such moments if we wish to maintain contact with the possible.”

But Homer is not Eustathius. The Byzantine commentator wants Bellerophon “caught by his own wings”; Homer doesn’t oblige. In the Iliad nothing tragic happens. Bellerophon hands over the letter, performs heroic feats, and marries the king’s other daughter. The folded tablet is never mentioned again. “Homer’s hero is a warrior and a winner. Love is incidental to him.” The metaphorical potential is fossilized in the story but cannot be drawn out without overinterpretation.

That the structure is there at all is what Carson cares about. A pre-Homeric imagination has already traced the angle the novelists will exploit a thousand years later: a love story where eros acts from a folded text; an erotic situation that goes from two terms to three when the lover triangulates; a written text as the mechanism of the complication; metaphor and inference and paradox moving along the angle the writing opens; “a blind point at the center of the story and at the center of its hero, Bellerophon,” into which several important questions disappear.

She closes by widening the frame. Francesca in Dante, Tatiana in Eugene Onegin who “whispers in a trance, by heart, a letter to the amiable hero,” Eudora Welty’s mother who “read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him,” Dickens himself writing to Maria Beadnell about how dearly that boy in David Copperfield must have loved her — “some current of eros leapt from a written page.” We’ve felt it ourselves, reading Montaigne or Heliodoros or Sappho. The question Bellerophon’s tablet opens, and that the rest of the book will press, is the obvious one: “Just what is erotic about reading and writing?”

Chapter 19: Realist

A short hinge of a chapter, more breath than argument. Carson is gathering up everything she has said about edges — between letters, between lovers, between reader and writer — and getting ready to turn the wheel.

She opens with two epigraphs that pull in opposite directions. Queen Victoria, widowed: “No one contradicts me now and the salt has gone out of my life.” And Chariton, from a Greek novel: “Eros loves strife and delights in paradoxical outcomes.” Salt and strife. The thing that pleases by resisting.

Then a quiet, summary paragraph. “It is nothing new to say that all utterance is erotic in some sense, that all language shows the structure of desire at some level.” The Greek verb mnaomai means both to give heed, to make mention and to court, to woo. The goddess Peithō presides over rhetoric and over seduction at once. Words travel “on wings” between mouths, the way eros travels between bodies.

But writing — writing makes this sharp. Reader and writer become two halves of one knucklebone (Carson’s recurring image, the symbolon, the broken token whose halves seek each other). “An intimate collusion occurs. The meaning composed is private and true and makes permanent, perfect sense.” Ideally. In practice, no.

In fact, neither reader nor writer nor lover achieves such consummation. The words we read and the words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

That sentence — Eros is in between — is the whole essay compressed into four words.

She closes the chapter with a self-conscious recap of the argument so far. The triangular shape of love poems, the paradoxical novels, Bellerophon carrying his own death-letter, the suspicion that what readers want from books and what lovers want from people are experiences of very similar design. “It is a necessarily triangular design, and it embodies a reach for the unknown.” Aristotle gets pulled in: “All men reach out to know.” The unplucked apple, the meaning not quite attained, the beloved just out of touch — these are all desirable objects of knowledge, and it is the job of eros to keep them so.

Then the title pays off. Eros is a “nervous realist in this sentimental domain.” A realist because he understands the only way to keep desire alive is to keep its object slightly out of focus — folded, as Carson puts it, “into a blind point where it can float known and unknown, actual and possible, near and far, desired and drawing you on.”

The chapter is doing housekeeping, but the housekeeping is also a setup. We have a blind point. Now, in the next chapter, Carson is going to put time inside it.

Chapter 20: Ice-pleasure

This is the chapter the book has been quietly building toward. Carson takes a single seven-line fragment of Sophokles and walks around it for a dozen pages, and by the end the small image at its center — a child holding a piece of ice — has become her most distilled metaphor for what desire is.

She begins with two more epigraphs, both about time. Augustine: “We cannot really say that time ‘is’ except in virtue of its continual tendency not to be.” And Auden, perfectly: “Time watches from the shadow / And coughs when you would kiss.”

Then the move from space to time. The blind point of Eros, she says, is a paradox in time as well as in space. To want the absent present is also to want then to fold over into now — and yet you know that the moment then becomes now, the bittersweet desire collapses. You bite the apple and the wanting ends.

As lover you reach forward to a point in time called ‘then’ when you will bite into the long-desired apple. Meanwhile you are aware that as soon as ‘then’ supervenes upon ‘now,’ the bittersweet moment, which is your desire, will be gone. You cannot want that, and yet you do.

That last sentence — You cannot want that, and yet you do — becomes a refrain. She will say it three times in this chapter.

The fragment

To make the feeling visible, Carson turns to a fragment from a lost satyr play of Sophokles called The Lovers of Achilles (Radt 149). She gives the Greek and then her own translation, the famous one:

This disease is an evil bound upon the day. Here’s a comparison — not bad, I think: when ice gleams in the open air, children grab. Ice-crystal in the hands is at first a pleasure quite novel. But there comes a point — you can’t put the melting mass down, you can’t keep holding it. Desire is like that. Pulling the lover to act and not to act, again and again, pulling.

A child grabs a shining piece of ice. At first it is delicious, a novelty. Then the hand cools, the ice melts, and the child cannot bear to keep holding it but cannot bear to let it go. Desire is like that.

Carson notes immediately what is not said. Desire is never called desirable; it is called a “disease” and an “evil.” The pain of cold ice in cold hands is never named. The melting is never called sad. Predictable attributes are absent, like a missing step on a staircase, and you climb on through anyway.

The two times

She then unfolds the structure as a kind of Escher print. The poem’s outer ring is desire (lines 1 and 8). Inside it sits the simile of the children with the ice (lines 2–7). So far, a clean ring composition. But — and here she takes us further up the staircase — time forms the outermost ring. Desire at the start of the poem is ephēmeron, “an ephemeral evil,” bound to the flickering day. Desire at the end is pollakis, repetition, “over and over again.” Transience on one side, recurrence on the other. The piece of ice sits at the dead center, melting.

And then the key move. The pleasure is described with the adjective potainious — “quite novel.” Carson tracks the word across other Greek poets, where it means innovative, fresh, newfangled, never-before-heard. With this single adjective Sophokles realigns the whole image. Ice melts because it is physical. But novelty also melts, because that is what novelty does — it cannot stay novel. Two different kinds of perishing are now braided together inside the same piece of ice.

Ice, as physical substance, cannot be said to be delightful because it melts; but if “melting” is itself a metaphor for the aesthetic consideration of novelty, a paradox begins to come into focus. Novelties, by definition, are shortlived. If ice-pleasure consists, to some degree, in novelty, then ice must melt in order to be desirable.

This is the line to underline. The thing must vanish in order to be the thing.

Two contradictory cares

Carson then walks through the experience of reading the simile in slow motion. You watch the ice melt and you feel two incompatible kinds of solicitude at once. For the ice: the longer the children hold it, the more it dies. For the children’s hands: the longer they hold it, the colder they get. Both arguments say put the ice down. But putting it down ends the pleasure, and the pleasure is the whole point. Time coughs from the shadow, Auden’s line returns. Time is the condition both of the delight and of its perishing.

She points out that the image works on a second register as well. Greek erotic poetry constantly imagines desire as melting — Eros is lusimelēs, “the limb-loosener,” the melter. She quotes Pindar:

but I am like wax of sacred bees like wax as the heat bites in: I melt whenever I look at the fresh limbs of boys.

In Pindar, melting is delicious. Sophokles takes that conventional sweet-melting trope and inverts it. His melting is cold, anxious, double-natured. “As we watch his melting ice, all our conventional responses to the melting experience of desire are dislocated.” The familiar trope and the strange new image won’t quite line up. Eros is in between — in between two ways of feeling melting itself.

The split mind

By the close of the chapter, Carson has Heisenberg in the room. There are kinds of knowledge, she reminds us, that cannot be held in the mind at the same time — position and velocity, for instance. Sophokles’ simile pulls you into precisely that kind of stereoscopic split. To save the ice you must freeze desire. You cannot want that, and yet you do. The lover’s mind is divided in just this way; the staircase reverses on itself and you find yourself standing on both flights at once.

A while before Heisenberg, Sophokles appears to have recognized that you can only go so far into thinking about time, or about desire. There comes a point where dilemmas arise, staircases reverse: Eros.

A long footnote at the end matters more than footnotes usually do. Editors since Arsenius have wanted to “fix” the first word of the fragment from ephēmeron (“bound upon the day”) to ephimeron (“lovely, desirable”), on the grounds that it makes more sense to begin a poem about desire with the word desirable than with the word temporary. Carson keeps the manuscript reading. Of course Sophokles begins the poem by binding desire into time. Time is the whole problem.

Chapter 21: Now Then

Having seated time inside the ice, Carson now zooms out to the structure of time itself as the lover experiences it. She borrows a passage from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse as her epigraph, and the passage is so good she essentially writes the chapter inside it:

Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved’s absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. … Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult tense, is: a pure portion of anxiety.

Lovers wait. They hate to wait, they love to wait. Wedged between the two, they become time-experts, reluctantly. Desire seems to wipe out time in the moment it strikes, and at the same time it carves a sharper line than anyone else can see between the precious now of wanting and all the lined-up thens before and after — one of which contains the beloved.

The lover’s real desire, as we see in that handful of ice, is to elude the certainties of physics and float in the ambiguities of a spacetime where absent is present and ‘now’ can include ‘then’ without ceasing to be ‘now.‘

The word dēute

Then a beautiful philological turn. Carson says that the Greek lyric poets — Sappho, Alkman, Anakreon — have a single word that does this temporal trick all by itself. The adverb dēute. She tallies up an almost comic catalog of citations to show how obsessively the love poets reach for it.

Dēute is a contraction (a crasis) of two smaller words. Dē is a particle of vivid present perception — look at that, now! — sharp, often a touch ironic, the kind of word you use when your eyes widen in real time. Aute means again, once more, not for the first time. Mash them together and you get a word that simultaneously plants you in the immediate present and yokes that present to a long history of identical past moments.

Dē places you in time and emphasizes that placement: now. Aute intercepts ‘now’ and binds it into a history of ‘thens’. … This is a word on which the eyes open wide in sudden perception, then narrow in understanding.

Carson reads the famous Sappho fragment 130 — the one she opened the entire book with — through this lens:

Eros — here it goes again! [dēute] — the limbloosener whirls me, sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up

That long, wild sigh of a particle — dēute — carries the whole psychology. Oh no, not again. The lover sees Eros coming and knows it is already too late. She quotes Sappho fragment 22 (desire flying dēute around a beloved girl named Gongyla) and Alkman fragment 59(a):

Eros — yes again! [dēute] — for Kyrpris’ sake the sweet one is melting me down, is making my heart grow warm

Each poem is “a stark evocation of the present moment intersected by an echo from the past.” The lover has learned to stand outside her own experience and telescope then onto now. It is the same mental move that lets you read the ice fragment as both new and ancient at once.

Why the lyric poets

Carson then asks where this trick of mind came from, and offers a hypothesis that links the whole essay together. These were probably among the first Greek poets, she suggests, to be working with reading and writing as well as speech. And literacy changes your relationship to time.

We habitually think of time as passage — a stream, a road, words on wings. Speech belongs to that flow: by the time you finish saying transient, the first syllable is already gone. But writing arrests it. The word transient stares back from the page and refuses to leave.

An act of reading and writing, on the other hand, is an experience of temporal arrest and manipulation. As writer or reader you stand on the edge of transience, and hear from the shadows the sound of an ambiguous cough. The word ‘transient’ stares back at you from the page, poignant as a piece of melting ice. And it does not pass away.

Reading and writing offer a small, exhilarating taste of control over time — exactly what the lover has been craving. You can open a book wherever you want, end when you want, reread the same line a hundred times. A piece of ice melts forever there. Isokrates, then Plato, get cited on this strange power: writing makes things “clear and fixed” for all time. Plato thinks this is a dangerous belief.

And here Carson pivots. The whole apparatus of the book — eros, edges, time, the blind point — is about to land in Plato’s Phaedrus, where a young man has fallen in love with a written text. “It is a point in time, as well as in space, for Plato formulates his worry specifically in the light of our mortal situation in time. If we focus on this blind point, the question of control may begin to come into focus.”

Chapter 22: Erotikos Logos

A short transitional chapter, almost an overture. Keats supplies the epigraph: “More happy love! more happy, happy love!” — the cry from the Grecian Urn, which is itself a poem about desire frozen at the perfect moment before consummation. The choice is not accidental.

The chapter introduces the situation of the Phaedrus. A young man named Phaedrus has fallen in love with a text. The text is a speech written by the sophist Lysias on the subject of love — what Plato calls an erotikos logos, literally an erotic discourse, a love-talk, the genre name in Greek for a set-piece speech about eros. Lysias’ speech argues, scandalously, that a beautiful boy ought to give his favors to a man who is not in love with him rather than to one who is — and proceeds to enumerate why.

Phaedrus is besotted. Carson notes the verbs Plato uses with quiet care: when Phaedrus gazes at the words of this text, desire stirs in him (epethumei); when he reads it aloud to Sokrates, visible joy animates him. Sokrates teases that Phaedrus treats the text the way one would treat a paidika, a beloved boy, and uses it to seduce Sokrates beyond the city limits — “to draw Sokrates beyond the city limits for an orgy of reading in the open countryside.” Sokrates, for his part, confesses to being a philologos, a lover of logos himself.

Eros and logos are fitted together in the Phaedrus as closely as two halves of a knucklebone. Let us see what meaning is being composed.

The symbolon image returns one more time, and the chapter ends. The two halves she has been describing all along — lover and beloved, reader and writer, now and then, melting ice and grasping hand — are about to meet inside a single Platonic dialogue. The Plato turn begins.

Chapter 23: The Sidestep

Carson opens Plato’s Phaedrus — the dialogue where Sokrates and a young man named Phaedrus sit under a plane tree by the Ilissos and talk about love and writing — by looking closely at the first speech Phaedrus has brought along in his pocket. It is by Lysias, a professional speechwriter, and its thesis is deliberately scandalous: a boy should grant his favors not to a lover but to a nonlover. The speech, Carson says, is “designed to alarm standard sentiment and displace preconceptions about love. It aims to be powerfully, seductively subversive.”

And yet, she notes, for all its showmanship the speech runs on a single trick. “The speech is simple, for it owes all its insights and shock value to one mechanism: Lysias takes up a particular vantage point on time.” He stands at the end of the love affair and looks back. He asks what a lover will feel once desire has cooled, and then uses that imagined aftertaste to poison the present. This, Carson observes, “is a point of view that no one who is in love could tolerate.” Lovers live inside what she calls “that ‘pure portion of anxiety,’ the present indicative of desire.” They are astonished when they fall in, astonished when they fall out. Lysias finds that astonishment embarrassing. He wants an adult arithmetic of pleasure.

Everything flows from a single claim: erotic desire is transient. Once the thrill fades the lover will lose interest, repudiate the relationship, and move on. The nonlover, unbound by the spike of present feeling, is free to be consistent. For him, Carson writes, “‘Now’ and ‘then’ are moments of equal value.” She lets Lysias’ nonlover make his own pitch to the boy he is courting:

… When I spend time with you I shall not primarily be cultivating the pleasure of the moment but, really, the profit coming in the future, since I am not overthrown by desire but in full control of myself. … These things are indications of a friendship that will last for a long time. (233b-c)

The nonlover, Carson notes, can afford to be generous precisely because he is not on fire. He will not mind when the boy’s face changes with age, will not block the boy from making new friends or picking up new ideas, will not abandon him when passion cools, will not feel a pang of regret in the morning:

For lovers regret their good services as soon as their desire ceases, but there is no time when it is appropriate for nonlovers to regret. (231a)

“There is no time when,” Carson repeats — and this is the hinge. Desire, for the nonlover, is never pain; and so ‘now’ and ‘then’ become interchangeable. His affair, she writes, “is a series of events in time that can be entered at any point or rearranged in any order without damage to the whole.” Lysias begins at the end and swims backward. Sokrates will later tease him for exactly this:

… he does not begin at the beginning but tries to swim backwards against the current of the logos, starting from the end. He begins with what the lover would say to his boy when the affair was over. (264a)

This, Carson says, is the sidestep. “Lysias sidesteps the whole dilemma of eros in one move. It is a move in time: he simply declines to enter the moment that is ‘now’ for the man in love, the present moment of desire. Instead, he stations himself safely at an imaginary ‘then’ and looks back upon desire from a vantage point of emotional disengagement.” The stereoscopic ache Carson has been tracking all book — the lover who wants two incompatible times at once, the Sophoklean man staring at his handful of melting ice — is neutralized. Lysias’ now and then are not discontinuous, not incompatible. They converge with no pain, because desire is invested at neither point. “The nonlover is unlikely ever to find himself staring down in desperation at a lump of melting ice. When this man picks up ice it is in full expectation that he will soon have a handful of cold water. He likes cold water fine. And he has no special affection for ice.”

Phaedrus finishes reading. Sokrates, unimpressed with the rhetoric but warmed up by the topic, says he seems to remember better versions of the same argument “by the beautiful Sappho, I think, or the wise Anakreon or even by some prose writers” (235c), and offers his own version. His speech does not contradict Lysias’ premise. It amplifies it. Sokrates agrees that the right question to ask about erotic experience is: what does the lover want from time? And he agrees that what the ordinary lover wants is to freeze the ‘now’ of desire in place, even if freezing it requires deforming the beloved.

So the Sokratic lover, as sketched in this first speech, becomes a jailer. He keeps the boy in shadow and cosmetics, away from outdoor life and “manly toils.” He sabotages the boy’s education, because a boy who outgrows him in mind will despise him. Above all he keeps the boy away from philosophy:

The lover is of necessity jealous and will do great damage to his beloved, restricting him from many advantageous associations which would do most to make a man of him, and especially from that which would bring his intellect to its capacity—that is, divine philosophy. The lover will have to keep his boy far away from philosophy, because of his enormous fear of being despised. And he will contrive to keep him ignorant of everything else as well, so the boy looks to his lover for everything. (239b-c)

And he will do everything he can to delay the boy’s entry into adult life — no wife, no child, no household — because the longer the boy is suspended, the longer the lover gets to pick the fruit:

Furthermore the lover would fervently wish his beloved to remain without marriage, child, or household for as long a time as possible, since it is his desire to reap the fruit that is sweet to himself for as long a time as possible. (240a)

“In sum,” Carson writes, “this harmful lover does not want his beloved boy to grow up. He prefers to stop time.” The lover and the nonlover, on this view, are just two different strategies for managing time’s erosion: Lysias’ nonlover steps outside the moment of desire altogether; Sokrates’ first-draft lover tries to pin the moment down forever. Both refuse to let time do what time does. And both of them, Sokrates ends by saying, deform the beloved in the attempt — the boy becomes an object exquisitely shaped to a single purpose, “as such the boy is most delightful to his lover just where he does most damage to himself” (239c). Carson lingers on the echo. This boy, frozen at the peak of his desirability, sounds like nothing so much as the piece of ice in the Sophoklean fragment — most beautiful in the instant of his own dissolution.

Chapter 24: Damage to the Living

“Damage is the subject of this dialogue,” Carson declares — and then pairs two apparently unrelated injuries. “Plato is concerned with two sorts of damage. One is the damage done by lovers in the name of desire. The other is the damage done by writing and reading in the name of communication.” Why does the Phaedrus yoke these two together? Because, Carson argues, Plato thinks they are the same damage wearing two costumes. “Plato appears to believe that they act on the soul in analogous ways and violate reality by the same kind of misapprehension.”

The misapprehension is the one we have just watched Sokrates dissect: the lover’s attempt “to freeze the beloved in time.” A parallel freeze is available, Carson observes, to anyone who puts words on a page. “It is not hard to see that a similar controlling attitude is available to the reader or writer, who sees in written texts the means to fix words permanently outside the stream of time.” She notes in passing that this was already an appealing idea to the ancient writing class — Isokrates, in Against the Sophists, boasted about “the immovable sameness of the written letter.” The written word holds still. That is its advertisement.

At the end of the Phaedrus, Sokrates finally turns from particular speeches to a more general question:

We should then examine the theory [logos] of what makes speaking or writing good, what makes them bad. (259e)

The answer, as Sokrates tells it, is blunt. Writing is useful mainly as a mnemonic crutch. To mistake it for a vessel of wisdom is to be naive:

He would be an extremely simple person who thought written words do anything more than remind someone who knows about the matter of which they are written. (275d)

Worse, reading flatters the reader into thinking he has learned something he has not:

… the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. (275b)

Carson draws out the logic carefully. “Sokrates conceives of wisdom as something alive, a ‘living breathing word’ (ton logon zōnta kai empsychon, 276a), that happens between two people when they talk. Change is essential to it, not because wisdom changes but because people do, and must.” Wisdom is a transaction between two living animals; writing is the stuffed specimen. And Sokrates has a devastating image ready for it:

Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange power, quite like painting in fact; for the creatures in paintings stand there like living beings, yet if you ask them anything they maintain a solemn silence. It is the same with written words. You might imagine they speak as if they were actually thinking something but if you want to find out about what they are saying and question them, they keep on giving the one same message eternally. (275d-e)

Paintings and books are stuffed animals. They look alive. They say nothing new. Ask them a question and they repeat themselves with dignity. “Like painting,” Carson writes, “the written word fixes living things in time and space, giving them the appearance of animation although they are abstracted from life and incapable of change.” Spoken logos is “a living, changing, unique process of thought. It happens once and is irrecoverable.” The best a written text can manage is to approximate, in its internal structure, the shape of a living creature:

organized like a live creature with a body of its own, not headless or footless but with middle and end fitted to one another and to the whole. (264c)

Which is precisely what Lysias’ speech fails to be. Lysias — as Sokrates has already complained — begins where he should end, swims backwards, and throws his sentences together in an order that makes no organic difference. “You can enter this logos at any point and find it saying the same thing.” Carson seals the thought with a line that rings like a gavel: “Once it is written down it continues to say that same thing forever over and over within itself, over and over in time. As communication, such a text is a dead letter.”

And here the trap snaps shut. Carson has, by now, made the crucial seam visible: Lysias’ nonlover, who steps outside the moment of desire and sees all moments of the affair as interchangeable, is doing in the erotic register exactly what Lysias’ speech is doing in the rhetorical register. Both refuse sequence. Both refuse the once-and-irrecoverable. Both freeze the living thing in order to handle it safely. The nonlover’s love affair can be entered at any point without damage to the whole; so can Lysias’ speech. Each is, in Carson’s stark phrase, a dead letter. Each mistakes sameness for consistency, and stillness for wisdom.

What Carson leaves glittering at the edge of the argument — and will return to — is that Plato himself is doing this inside a written dialogue. He is writing about the danger of writing. He is using eros-talk to warn against eros. The Phaedrus performs, on the page, the very predicament it diagnoses: a living conversation pinned down in ink, animated only when a reader consents to bring it back to life. Sokrates’ voice, solemn in paint, keeps saying the same thing eternally. Unless we ask.

Chapter 25: Midas

To clinch the case against Lysias’ speech, Sokrates reaches for an unlikely comparison: a tombstone. He cites the famous epigram that was said to be carved on the tomb of Midas the Phrygian, and the comparison is meant to wound.

Bronze maiden am I and on Midas’ mound I lie. As long as water flows and tall trees bloom, Right here fixed fast on the tearful tomb, I shall announce to all who pass near: Midas is dead and buried here!

Carson lingers over the form before the content. The epitaph is spoken by a bronze girl. She is “youthful forever and proud to defy the world of time and change and living phenomena passing before her.” Beside her lies Midas, equally aloof — “he in death, she in letters.” The poem advertises death as a victory over time, a “single unchangeable fact in one unchanging form into eternity.” More damningly, Sokrates points out a quirk of its design: every line is independent in sense and meter, so the lines can be shuffled without loss. “I suppose you notice,” Sokrates says to Phaedrus, “that it makes no difference which line is read first or which read last.”

That is the dagger meant for Lysias. His speech, too, has parts that could be reordered without anyone noticing — it “starts where it should end and follows no cogent order throughout its exposition.” But Carson presses past the rhetorical jab to the deeper analogy. Lysias’ nonlover, the cool figure who refuses the disordering rush of “now,” is built on the same logic as the epigram. He stands outside the time of desire so that he can stand outside its emotions too, treating “all moments of the love affair as equal and interchangeable.” The bronze maiden does in stone what the nonlover does in life: she promises “unchanging consistency in the face of transforming time.”

And then there is Midas himself, whom Carson invites us not to skim past. Aristotle had already enshrined him as a cautionary figure, a man absurdly rich and starving:

It is an absurd thing [atopon] for wealth to be of such a kind that a man who is rich with it dies of starvation, like the mythological Midas: by reason of the insatiability of his prayer, everything set before him became gold.

Carson reads this with one of her characteristic compressions: “Midas is an image of someone stranded in his own desire, longing to touch and not to touch at the same time, like the children in Sophokles’ poem with their hands full of ice. Perfect desire is perfect impasse.” The deepest wish of any desirer, she suggests, is “to keep on desiring” — and the golden touch is exactly that wish granted. It is “self-extinguishing, self-perpetuating desire.” It also, fatally, fixes whatever it loves. The things Midas reaches for “stop in time.” So does the boy whom the conventional erastēs pins at the akmē of his bloom, kept enjoyable for as long as possible. Plato never names the connection out loud — Carson does it for him — but the Midas touch shadows the lover who wants to halt his beloved at a moment of gold.

This is where the chapter quietly tightens. Both Sokrates and Lysias agree that the standard lover does damage by trying to “block the natural currents of physical and personal development” of the boy he loves. Where they part ways is in the cure. Lysias’ answer is to step out of time entirely — what Sokrates dismisses as “swimming backwards against the current” — the same jeu d’esprit as the epigram on the tomb. For Plato, this is not just bad rhetoric. It is “a crime against eros.”

Chapter 26: Cicadas

The cicadas wander into the dialogue almost casually. Sokrates and Phaedrus are passing from one topic to the next when Sokrates looks up at the noon heat and notices the chorus in the branches:

… and the cicadas appear to be staring down at us, singing away in the heat over our heads and chatting with one another.…

Phaedrus is curious, so Sokrates supplies the myth — one of the loveliest small parables in Plato:

Once upon a time, the story goes, cicadas were human beings, before the birth of the Muses. When the Muses were born and song came into being, some of these creatures were so struck by the pleasure of it that they sang and sang, forgot to eat and drink, and died before they knew it. From them the race of cicadas arose, and they have this special privilege from the Muses: from the time they are born they need no nourishment, they just sing continually without eating or drinking until they die.…

Carson sets the cicadas down beside Midas and lets the pair illuminate each other. Both are creatures starving in pursuit of their desire, but the cicadas’ version of the dilemma is “nobler.” Their passion is musical, and their solution to the lover’s paradox of “now” and “then” is the inverse of Lysias’. Where Lysias’ nonlover stations himself permanently at the end of desire, sacrificing the “intense and transient pleasure of the lover’s ‘now’” for an extended, predictable “then,” the cicadas do the opposite: they invest “their whole lives in the momentous delight of ‘now.’” They simply step into the present indicative of pleasure and stay there until, in Sokrates’ phrase, “they escape their own notice, having died” (elathon teleutēsantes hautous).

Carson’s gloss is flat and exact: “They are stranded in a living death of pleasure.” Unlike Midas, they are happy in their bargain. And yet — they are cicadas. They were once men but “preferred to decline from human status because they found man’s condition incompatible with their desire for pleasure.” Their entire lifelong activity is the prosecution of that one desire. It is, she notes drily, “not a choice open to human beings, nor to any organism that is committed to living in time.” The myth hovers between gift and warning. The Muses’ privilege is also a forfeit of being human.

Chapter 27: Gardening for Fun and Profit

A third image, and the most teasing. Plato turns to gardens, and Carson reads the move as one of his slyer maneuvers. The setting is the festival pots known as the gardens of Adonis — small dishes of wheat, barley, and fennel sown in fifth-century Athens, “forced to grow unseasonably fast for enjoyment during the eight days of the festival.” Rootless. Brilliant. Discarded the day after. “Their hectic lives were meant to reflect that of Adonis himself, plucked in the bloom of his youth by the goddess Aphrodite, dead in his prime as a result.” It is, Carson observes in passing, “the fast and beautiful career of the ideal beloved.”

Sokrates pulls these forced blooms into the conversation as an analogy for the written word, and asks Phaedrus a leading question:

Now tell me this. Do you think a sensible gardener, who cared for his seeds and wished to see them bear fruit, would plant them with serious intention in gardens of Adonis at high summer and take pleasure in watching them grow beautiful in a space of eight days? Or would he do that sort of thing, when he did it at all, only for fun or a festival? And, when he was serious, would he not apply his skill as a gardener and sow in fitting soil and be gratified when the seeds he had sown came to full bloom in the eighth month?

Phaedrus agrees, of course: no real gardener would. By the same logic, no thinker serious about communicating thoughts would “sow them in ink with a reedpen.” Gardens of letters, like gardens of Adonis, are for play. Real thoughts need real soil — “planted as seeds of living speech in the ground of an appropriate soul, they will take root, ripen, and bear fruit as knowledge in due season.”

Carson reads this as the pivot of the dialogue’s whole worry about reading and writing. Written texts, she says, “make available the notion that one knows what one has merely read,” and for Plato that confusion is dangerous. “He believes the reach for knowledge to be a process that is necessarily lived out in space and time.” The eight-day plants are an image of that delusion — “quick-access sophia.” The “urgent agriculture of Adonis” also mirrors Lysias’ speech, which “starts where it should end and achieves its rhetorical and conceptual purposes by a violent shortcut through the beginning stages of love.”

Then Carson adds the third angle, the one that gives the analogy its sting. The plants of Adonis, “forced too quickly to their akmē, held at the peak of their bloom while the festival lasts, discarded the next day,” are also an image of how the conventional erastēs uses his paidika. Sokrates has already named the manipulation directly:

The lover will passionately wish his paidika to remain unmarried and childless and homeless for as long a time as possible, since it is his desire to reap the fruit of what is sweet to himself for as long a time as possible.

Carson lets the line sit without ornament: “This lover prefers to play his erotic games with a partner who has neither roots nor future.”

Chapter 28: Something Serious Is Missing

A short bridge, and a quiet one. The static blooms of Adonis answer the question Carson has been worrying — what does the lover ask of time? — and the answer aligns the lover with the reader once again. “As lover you want ice to be ice and yet not melt in your hands. As reader you want knowledge to be knowledge and yet lie fixed on a written page.” The wants are paradoxical in the same way, and they hurt in the same way: each places you “at a blind point from which you watch the object of your desire disappear into itself.”

Plato knows this pain, Carson insists, and re-creates it deliberately. His analogies are not flat overlays. “An analogy is constructed in three-dimensional space. Its images float one upon the other without convergence: there is something in between, something paradoxical: Eros.” Eros is what runs underneath the Adonis ritual, what runs underneath the conversation that writing tries to imitate. The trouble starts when we mistake the ritual or the page for the thing itself — when the suspended time of festivals and reading is taken for the real time of a life. That mistake leaves you, she says, “with a dead garden, or with a love affair such as Lysias prescribes for the nonlover.” Something essential has gone missing. The chapter ends on the word that has been waiting all along: Eros.

Chapter 29: Takeover

Carson opens with Kundera, whose narrator envies the novelist his prerogative to rewrite his own beginning — to cross out what offends him and start again. Lysias, in her reading, has this same ambition. He is the writer as lover, or rather the writer as non-lover: a man who steps back from the moving current of the beloved’s life and sets himself at “the vantage point of the writer.” His speech treats the erotic event as a fixed text. It can be begun anywhere, read backwards, and still deliver the same sense.

Plato presents Lysias as someone who thinks himself able to control all the risks, alarms and inebriations of eros by means of a prodigious emotional calculus.

The seduction of that speech is real. Phaedrus reads it over and over, as if in love with the words. Carson wants us to feel what Lysias is offering: self-control. The one thing no one who has ever been in love could fail to covet. And then she asks the question the Greeks could not leave alone — how do apparently external events enter and take control of one’s psyche?

Her answer is the long poetic inheritance. Eros in the Greek lyric tradition is not an inward disposition but an assault from outside. Aphrodite materializes on the wall of Troy in an otherwise ordinary afternoon and drops desire on Helen; Helen resists for a moment, and Aphrodite flattens her with a threat. Carson gathers the vocabulary of this tradition into a single breathless inventory:

Eros comes out of nowhere, on wings, to invest the lover, to deprive his body of vital organs and material substance, to enfeeble his mind and distort its thinking, to replace normal conditions of health and sanity with disease and madness. The poets represent eros as an invasion, an illness, an insanity, a wild animal, a natural disaster. His action is to melt, break down, bite into, burn, devour, wear away, whirl around, sting, pierce, wound, poison, suffocate, drag off or grind the lover to a powder.

This is the conviction Plato writes into. Lysias himself concedes it — the lover is sick, not sane, not in his right mind, unable to control himself (231d). From this condition, which the Greeks call mania, the harm flows. And here Carson makes the small structural observation that opens the whole chapter out: the trouble is finding the point of entry. When does desire begin? By the time you know you are falling, it is already too late. Dēute, as the poets say — again, again. Lysias claims to have solved this by never letting eros begin at all. He writes from the end of the affair as if he had never been taken over. He is, Sokrates says, deploying a sōphrosynē thnētē, a mortal self-control that disburses itself “in mortal miserly measurings” and engenders in the beloved soul “that spirit of begrudgement commonly praised as virtue” (256e). It is the economy of a miser counting gold. The nonlover refuses to invest in the one moment that is open to risk — the moment when desire begins, the instant called now.

He already knows how the novel will end, and he has firmly crossed out the beginning.

Chapter 30: Read Me the Bit Again

The chapter’s epigraph is from John Holloway — “read that bit, the thing we cannot turn our eyes to, you begin it” — and Carson uses it to catch something about how Sokrates handles Lysias’ text. He keeps asking Phaedrus to read the beginning aloud. Once, and then once more. Come on, read me the beginning of Lysias’ speech (262d). A page later: Please, will you reread his beginning one more time? (263e). Phaedrus gets politely reluctant. He knows what Sokrates is doing, and he knows it won’t work.

Yes, I will if you like, but the thing you are looking for is not there. (263e)

The thing Sokrates is looking for, Carson says, is the now of desire. The trouble is that Lysias’ first sentence has already dispatched it: “My business you know and, as to how I think these things that have transpired between us should turn out, you have heard” (230e). The erotic relation is stated in the past tense before the speech has even begun. There is no opening moment to be found, because Lysias has deleted it.

Carson presses on this because for her it is the whole argument. Sokrates will insist — in the most dignified language Plato can muster (245c-46) — that everything in existence has a beginning, with one exception: the beginning itself. Only the archē controls its own beginning. Lysias’ act of crossing out is a usurpation of that control, and it is a fiction. In reality, the instant eros enters you is the one moment you cannot control. What comes with it — good, evil, bitter, sweet — arrives gratuitously and unpredictably, a gift of the gods. From that moment on the story is largely yours. But the beginning is not.

Then Carson does the thing she does — she leans into an etymology and a whole reading opens out:

We should note that the Greek verb ‘to read’ is anagignōskein, a compound of the verb ‘to know’ (gignōskein) and the prefix ana, meaning ‘again.’ If you are reading, you are not at the beginning.

To read is to know again. Reading is the posture of the belated. Phaedrus, asked for the beginning a second and third time, is being asked for a thing that is structurally unavailable to anyone with a text in his hands. The beginning is what happens before the text.

And this, Carson says, is why the incursion of Eros is an education. The moment of entry is the moment you come into contact with what is inside you. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.

What is this mode of perception, so different from ordinary perception that it is well described as madness? How is it that when you fall in love you feel as if suddenly you are seeing the world as it really is? A mood of knowledge floats out over your life. You seem to know what is real and what is not. Something is lifting you toward an understanding so complete and clear it makes you jubilant.

For Sokrates this mood is not a delusion. It is a glance down into time, at realities once known — as staggeringly beautiful as the glance of your beloved (249e-50c). The point of time Lysias has deleted is, for Sokrates, the single most important moment to confront and grasp. And so the two answers to the erotic dilemma of time stand antithetical to each other. Lysias edits now out and narrates entirely from then. Sokrates proposes instead to assimilate now so that it prolongs itself over the whole of life and beyond. He would inscribe his novel within the instant of desire. Carson closes the chapter with an ominous little aside — this Sokratic literary ambition will have a serious effect on the story Plato is telling in the Phaedrus. It will make it disappear.

Chapter 31: Then Ends Where Now Begins

Sokrates and Lysias agree on the facts of the case. Eros changes you so drastically you seem to become a different person; this change looks like madness; and what convention says to do with a mad person, Lysias has already done — he has written him out of the novel. Sokrates’ reply is not to deny the facts, but to re-read them. Let us see how, Carson says, and then hands the page over to the palinode — the song of recantation — which is the lyric high point of the Phaedrus and the hinge of Carson’s whole book.

I must say this story [logos] is not true, the story that a nonlover should be gratified in preference to a lover on the grounds that the latter is mad while the former is sane. Now, if it were a simple fact that madness [mania] is evil, the story would be fine. But the fact is, the greatest of good things come to us through madness when it is conferred as a gift of the gods. (244a)

The central argument, as Carson reconstructs it, is that you keep your mind to yourself at the cost of closing out the gods. Prophecy, healing, poetry — none of these, Sokrates says, is practiced by anyone who has not lost his mind (244a-45). Madness is the instrument of intelligence. And in private life, erotic mania is a valuable thing: it puts wings on your soul.

Carson watches Sokrates take the poets’ own vocabulary and turn it inside out.

Where they see loss and damage, Sokrates insists on profit and growth. Where they see ice melting, he says wings grow. Where they brace themselves against takeover, he unfolds himself for flight.

Wings in the tradition are the mechanism by which Eros swoops on the unsuspecting lover and wrests control of his person. Wings are damage, wings are irresistible force. Carson gathers the poets on this. Sappho’s eptoaisen in fragment 31 — something like “it puts the heart in my chest on wings.” Anakreon’s I am soaring toward Olympos on light wings for the sake of Eros (378 PMG). Alkaios on Helen, [Eros] made Helen’s heart fly like a wing in her chest and she went out of her mind for a Trojan man and followed him over the sea (LP fr. 283). Archias in the Palatine Anthology, dry and neat: “You should flee Eros”: empty effort! / How shall I elude on foot one who chases me on wings?

Plato takes this traditional wing and reimagines it.

Wings are no foreign machinery of invasion in Plato’s conception. They have natural roots in each soul, a residue of its immortal beginnings.

Our souls, Sokrates says, once lived among the gods, nourished as gods are by the infinite elation of looking at reality all the time. We are exiled from that life but remember it from time to time — when, for instance, we look upon beauty and fall in love (246-51). And we have the power to go back, because the wings are still rooted in us. When you fall in love, and all sorts of sensations crowd in at once, painful and pleasant, that is your wings sprouting (251-52). It is the beginning of what you mean to be.

And now Carson loops the chapter’s argument back onto itself with her steadiest sentence of the section:

Beginnings are crucial. It becomes clearer now why Sokrates is so intent on them. For Sokrates, the moment when eros begins is a glimpse of the immortal ‘beginning’ that is a soul.

The now of desire, she writes, is “a shaft sunk into time and emerging onto timelessness, where the gods float, rejoicing in reality” (247d-e). When you enter now you remember what it is like to be really alive, the way gods are. She pauses on the paradox — a memory of a time that is timeless — because this is where the two readings of eros finally part company.

Lysias is appalled by the paradox and crosses it out. Every erotic now is for him the beginning of an end, nothing more; he prefers a changeless, unending then. But Sokrates looks at the paradoxical moment called now and notices a curious movement taking place there.

At the point where the soul begins itself, a blind point seems to open out. Into the blind point ‘then’ disappears.

Chapter 32: What a Difference a Wing Makes

Wings, Carson proposes, mark the border between a mortal and an immortal story of love. Lysias shrinks from the beginning of eros because he reads the beginning as an ending in disguise; Sokrates welcomes the beginning because he believes, really, that it can have no end. The same difference distributes their strategies. Lysias arms himself with a “miserly and mortal sōphrosynē (256e)” — a budget of self-control rationed out in small, survivable doses against the change of self that eros forces on a person. Change is risk. What makes the risk worthwhile?

The Phaedrus has already offered its grim counter-images of changelessness — Midas, the cicadas, the garden of Adonis — each one a portrait of a life held safely aloof from time, and each one, as Sokrates puts it, amounting to no better than “escape your own notice having died” (cf. 259c). Against these, Sokrates sets his myth of wings: a glimpse of what mortals stand to gain when eros actually enters their lives.

Carson insists that Sokrates is not naive about the transaction. Falling in love grants access to an infinite good. But Eros, in his true form, also takes away something hard to measure. The lover abandons the forms of ordinary life. Everything else slips:

… he forgets his mother and his brothers and all his comrades, couldn’t care less if his property is lost through neglect, and, in disdain of all those proprieties and decorums whose beauty he once cherished, he is ready to be a slave, to sleep anywhere he is allowed, as close as possible to his desire. (252a)

Falling in love, she writes, dislocates your view of what is significant. Aberrant behavior ensues. Rules of decorum go by the wayside. Sokrates gives the common name of this common experience: men call this pathos Eros (252b).

Then a pun. Sokrates announces that Eros has another name — divulging it, he concedes, is “pretty outrageous” (hybristikon panu, 252a) and possibly untrue. It comes in two lines of spurious Homer, of which the second line doesn’t even scan:

Now mortals call him winged Eros but immortals call him Pteros, because of the wing-growing necessity. (252c)

By adding pt- to Eros, the gods make Pteros, from pteron, “wing.” In the language of the gods, then, desire is “the winged one,” the one who has something to do with wings. Why? Because desire entails a “wing-growing necessity.”

Carson lingers over the old idea that the gods have their own language — Homer’s scattered allusions, Plato’s Cratylus on the matter, the philologists’ modest theory about Greek and pre-Greek populations. The ancients took a bolder view. “Clearly the gods call things by the names which are naturally right” (Cratylus 391e); “Surely gods call themselves by their true names” (400e). Pteros, in other words, is truer than Eros. It names not just what desire is called but why — what Sokrates distinguishes as the pathos (the describable experience) and the aitia (the definitive cause) of desire (252c). Mortals had already grasped the pathos: they felt desire swoop through their insides and called it winged. What they had not grasped was the reason.

And yet — and this is where Carson turns the screw — the divine name, which is meant to be the truer name, blunders as poetry. Sokrates flags the line as unmetrical. The pt- the gods add to erōs forces a short syllable into a long one: de, by nature short and placed where a short syllable is required, becomes long because two consonants follow it. “Gods evidently see reality differently,” Carson writes. “But it is not surprising if their better version of the truth resists reduction to human measures.”

Here she folds the argument home. De cannot be both long and short at once, at least not in the reality as we see it — and Carson pauses over the familiar contour of this dilemma, reminding us of the children in Sophokles’ poem who want to hold ice in their hands and also want to put it down. Pteros disrupts our metrics in the same way that Eros deforms our lives:

Meter, essentially, is an attempt to control words in time. We impose such control in the interests of beauty. But when Eros flashes into your life he brings his own standard of beauty and simply cancels out “all those proprieties and decorums whose beauty you once cherished” (252a).

Plato’s botched epic verse epitomizes the whole human transaction with Eros. The terms are wrenching: you may gain an enlargement of meaning by admitting Eros in his true godly form as Pteros, but only at the cost of the formal beauty of your line of verse. Reverse the terms and you have Lysias, with his novelist’s craft, designing a formally perfect love affair that means nothing at all.

Eros’ wings mark a critical difference between gods and men, Carson concludes, because they defy human expression. Our words are too small. Our rhythms too restrictive. And even when a line of poetry gives us accidental access to the divine pathos and aitia, we do not necessarily catch on. What does “wing-growing necessity” even mean? Does Eros have wings, need wings, cause others to have or to need wings, need to cause others to need to have wings? Various possibilities drift out of the line, none excluding the others. Maybe the gods mean all of them at once. We can’t know. And, in a final turn, Carson notes that the manuscripts transmit three different readings of the adjective rendered “wing-growing” — a tiny accident of textual transmission that sharpens Plato’s point in a way he could never have predicted:

No matter what technologies we devise, the knowledge of Eros available to us is no clear or certain thing. (cf. Phdr. 275c) Gods may know exactly what is meant by the name Pteros or by a phrase like “wing-growing necessity” but, in the end, we do not. We do our utmost to grasp the pathos of erotic experience as it soars through our lives, but the aitia folds itself away and disappears into the written words of Plato’s text.

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Chapter 33: What Is This Dialogue About?

Carson opens with Basho — “old pond / frog jumps in / plop” — and then asks Plato’s question about Plato’s own dialogue.

The Phaedrus, she proposes, is an exploration of the dynamics and dangers of controlled time, of the kind of time that makes itself accessible to readers, writers, and lovers alike. In Sokrates’ view, a true logos shares one crucial feature with a real love affair: it has to be lived out in time. It isn’t the same backwards as forwards. You can’t enter it at any point. You can’t freeze it at its acme. You can’t dismiss it when the fascination wavers.

A reader, like a bad lover, may feel he can zoom into his text at any point and pluck the fruit of its wisdom. A writer like Lysias may feel he can rearrange the limbs of the fiction on which he dotes with no regard for its life as an organism in time. “So readers and writers dabble in the glamor of grammata without submitting themselves to wholesale erotic takeover or the change of self entailed in it.” Like Odysseus bound to the mast, Carson writes, the reader “may titillate himself with the siren song of knowledge and sail past intact. It is a kind of voyeurism.”

Plato’s view, as Carson reads it, is that the Lysian text is philosophic pornography beside the erotic logos of Sokrates. But the demonstration of this needs a ruse. Plato cannot simply set one dead text beside another. So he floats logos upon logos; they neither converge nor cancel out.

Carson gathers her other stereoscopic artists into the frame — Sappho in fragment 31 superimposing one level of desire upon another, floating the actual upon the possible; Longus floating his apple on a tree already stripped of fruit; Zeno suspending moving objects on the impossibility of motion, so Achilles runs as fast as he can and goes nowhere. These writers share a strategy:

They purpose to re-create in you a certain action of the mind and heart — the action of reaching out toward a meaning not yet known. It is a reach that never quite arrives, bittersweet.

Plato’s interplay of logoi in the Phaedrus, she argues, imitates this reaching. As Phaedrus reads what Lysias wrote and listens to what Sokrates says, something begins to come into focus. You begin to understand what a logos is and what it is not, and the difference between them. “Eros is the difference.” Like a face crossing a mirror at the back of the room, Eros moves. You reach. Eros is gone.

And then the final turn, which has always charmed the dialogue’s readers: the Phaedrus is a written dialogue that ends by discrediting written dialogues. Carson names this its fundamental erotic feature. Each time you read it, you are conducted to a place where something paradoxical happens — the knowledge of Eros that Sokrates and Phaedrus have been carefully unfolding word by word “simply steps into a blind point and vanishes, pulling the logos in after it.” The conversation about love (227a–57c) slides into a conversation about writing (257c–79c), and Eros is never seen or heard from again.

This dialectical interception has perplexed everyone since antiquity who has tried to say concisely what the dialogue is about. Carson’s answer is that there’s nothing inappropriate about it at all:

If you reach into the Phaedrus to get hold of Eros, you will be eluded, necessarily. He never looks at you from the place from which you see him. Something moves in the space between. That is the most erotic thing about Eros.

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Chapter 34: Mythoplokos

Mythoplokos — myth-weaver, weaver of fictions. Sappho’s word for Eros. Carson takes it as the title of her closing chapter and, by implication, as the name of her own essay.

She begins with a thought experiment. Imagine a city where there is no desire. Its inhabitants still eat, drink, procreate — mechanically — but their life looks flat. They do not theorize or spin tops or speak figuratively. Few think to shun pain; none give gifts. They bury their dead and forget where. Zeno is mayor, set to work copying the legal code on sheets of bronze. Now and again a man and a woman marry and live quite happily, “as travellers who meet by chance at an inn”; at night, falling asleep, they dream the same dream, where they watch fire move along a rope that binds them together — but it is unlikely they remember the dream in the morning. The art of storytelling is widely neglected.

“A city without desire is, in sum, a city of no imagination. Here people think only what they already know. Fiction is simply falsification. Delight is beside the point.”

The city has an akinetic soul, and Aristotle can tell us why. Whenever any creature is moved to reach out for what it desires, the movement begins in an act of imagination — phantasia. Without phantasia, neither animal nor man would bestir themselves to reach out of the present condition or beyond what they already know. Phantasia stirs the mind by its power of representation; it prepares desire by picturing the desired object as desirable. Phantasia tells the mind a story. And the story must make one thing clear: the difference between what is present/actual/known and what is lacking/possible/unknown, the difference between desirer and desired (Arist., De An. 3.10.433a–b).

Carson has already shown what shape this story takes — in lyric poems, in novels, in dialectic. A three-point circuit is required. She returns to Sappho’s fragment 31 — the “erotic triangle” where all three components of desire become visible at once in a sort of electrification — and now she can say what she could only suggest then: the triangle is not a poet’s elegance. Desire cannot be perceived apart from these three angles. Aristotle’s phantasia tells us why. Every desiring mind reaches out toward its object by an imaginative action. No lover, poet or otherwise, can hold his desire aloof from the fictive, triangulating enterprise Sappho revealed in fragment 31.

“Eros makes every man a poet” says the ancient wisdom (Eur. Sthen., TGF, fr.663; Pl. Symp. 196e). Eros is always a story in which lover, beloved and the difference between them interact. The interaction is a fiction arranged by the mind of the lover. It carries an emotional charge both hateful and delicious and emits a light like knowledge.

“No one took a more clear-eyed view of this matter than Sappho. No one caught its features more accurately in adjectives.” Carson has carried the weight of Sappho’s glukupikron — “bittersweet” — through the whole of this book. Here, at the end, she returns with Sappho’s other great label for Eros, preserved by Maximus of Tyre:

Sokrates calls Eros a Sophist, but Sappho calls him “weaver of fictions” [mythoplokon].

Carson dwells on this alignment. “How intriguing this alignment of Sappho and Sokrates, this bracketing of the storyteller with the professor of wisdom: they have Eros in common.” For Sappho, the desirability of desire seems bound up with the fictional process — the weaving of myth. For Sokrates, something in this same process looks like sophistry. And yet they are, in the end, naming the same thing.

The ancient analogy Carson has tracked since her opening — the analogy between the wooing of knowledge and the wooing of love, first glimpsed in the Homeric verb mnaomai — now turns inside out. Sokrates, on his own testimony, prefers to collapse the two poles into one. A single question arches through his life, a single research in which comprehension of the truly real and pursuit of the truly desirable are identified. Twice in the dialogues he says his knowledge is nothing but a knowledge of “erotic things” — ta erōtika (Symp. 177d; Theag. 128b). He never says what he means by it. Carson deduces it from his life:

He loved to ask questions. He loved to hear answers, construct arguments, test definitions, uncover riddles and watch them unfold out of one another in a structure opening down through the logos like a spiralling road or a vertigo. He loved, that is, the process of coming to know.

Sokrates tells us precisely where Eros is located in this process. Eros lives at the intersection of two principles of reasoning — synagōgē (collection) and diaeresis (division), the act of drawing scattered particulars together into a clear idea, and the act of cutting things apart at their natural joints:

We think by projecting sameness upon difference, by drawing things together in a relation or idea while at the same time maintaining the distinctions between them. A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space.

To reach across that space, a kind of stereoscopy is required. It is the same stereoscopy Carson has traced in Sappho, in the novelists, in Zeno — and now she lays her conclusion bare: the erotic ruse of novels and poems is, in fact, “the very structure of human thinking.” When the mind reaches out to know, the space of desire opens and a necessary fiction transpires.

This is what Sokrates means when he calls himself, astonishingly, a lover of collections and divisions:

The fact is, Phaedrus, I am myself a lover [erastes] of these divisions and collections. (Phdr. 266b)

Carson pauses on this. “That is a startling thing to say. But he must have been serious.” His life was given to the activity. Carson traces the impulse back to Delphi, to the Pythia’s pronouncement that Sokrates was the wisest of men, and to his eventual conclusion about what she meant:

In this one small thing at least it seems I am wiser — that I do not think I know what I do not know. (Ap. 21d)

“A power to see the difference between what is known and what is unknown constitutes Sokrates’ wisdom and motivated his searching life. The activity of reaching out for that difference is one with which he admits he is in love.”

And now the book closes. Carson returns one last time to her two witnesses — the philosopher and the poet — and gives them their final image:

Both the philosopher and the poet find themselves describing Eros in images of wings and metaphors of flying, for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to over there, launching the mind on a story.

In the city without desire, such flights are unimaginable. Wings are kept clipped. The known and the unknown learn to line up one behind the other so that, from the right angle, they appear to be the same. If there were a visible difference, you might find it hard to say so — for even the useful verb mnaomai will have come to mean a fact is a fact.

And then, Carson’s last line. The bittersweet closes on a question:

It is a high-risk proposition, as Sokrates saw quite clearly, to reach for the difference between known and unknown. He thought the risk worthwhile, because he was in love with the wooing itself. And who is not?

The book has circled back to Sappho’s apple in the topmost bough — the one the apple-pickers could not reach, not because they forgot, but because they could not. The reach is the thing. The difference is the thing. Carson has named her own essay, by its last word, a mythoplokos piece — fiction and fact and feeling woven together — and she leaves us with Sappho’s adjective, the one she has carried since page one: glukupikron. Bittersweet. The lover and the philosopher are doing the same thing. The essay ends where desire begins, with the wings starting, faintly, to itch.

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Claude’s Take

There are very few books that are simultaneously a piece of literary criticism, a meditation on the history of writing, a reading of Plato, and a love poem to the act of paying attention. Eros the Bittersweet is that rare kind of book. Carson does not argue in the normal academic sense — she circles, she accretes, she lets images from Kafka and Zeno and Velazquez drift past Sappho and Plato and settle into patterns. The method would be insufferable in lesser hands. In hers it earns its strangeness. Each small chapter is an arrested moment of attention, and by the end you realize the book has enacted its own thesis: you have been running breathlessly after a spinning meaning, and the running itself was the point.

What works. The reading of Sappho fragment 31 — Carson’s “triangulation” — has become canonical for a reason: once she has named the three-point circuit of lover, beloved, and the space between, you cannot unsee it, and you will find yourself spotting it in every love poem you read for the rest of your life. The alphabet-as-edge argument in chapter ten is exhilarating even if you are not fully persuaded; nobody else was asking what the materiality of literacy does to the interior life, and the question alone is a gift. The sustained reading of Plato’s Phaedrus across the last third is the single best thing I know on that dialogue — generous to Sokrates, generous to Lysias, and alive to the paradox that Plato is writing a written warning against writing. And the aphoristic compression, sentence after sentence, is a pleasure in its own right. “For in this dance the people do not move. Desire moves. Eros is a verb.” One could furnish a commonplace book with lines like that.

What creaks. Carson’s claim that the alphabet caused or enabled a new kind of self-consciousness is a hypothesis in literary-critical dress — a provocation more than a proof, and she would probably be the first to admit it. The universalizing move, which treats every love poem and every novel as performing the same three-term geometry, can feel too tidy; the reader occasionally wants a poem that refuses the schema. And the book is unapologetically a classicist’s book — without at least a foggy memory of the Phaedrus or a translation of Sappho beside you, some chapters will land harder than others. Keep a text open beside it, or read it twice: the second pass is when the joins snap into place.

Who should read it. Anyone who reads poetry and wants to read it better. Anyone curious about the history of how emotions have been felt, not just labelled. Readers of Barthes (especially A Lover’s Discourse), readers of Proust, readers of Sappho and Plato. Anyone who has noticed that reading a book and being in love are structurally related experiences and suspects this is not a metaphor. The book is small enough to read in a long afternoon and good enough to keep returning to for years.

Score: 9.5/10. Carson is often called one of the great prose stylists in English; this book is a big part of why. It is a permanent object in a way almost nothing published in 1986 turned out to be, and it reads, still, as if it were written yesterday.