Tag: anne carson

Aristophanes’ judgment ([that] “no lover could want anything else” [than eternal oneness]) is belied by the anthropology of his own myth. Was it the case that the round beings of his fantasy remained perfectly content rolling about the world in prelapsarian oneness? No. They got big ideas and started rolling toward Olympus to make an attempt on the gods (190b–c). They began reaching for something else. So much for oneness.

Anne Carson, Eros: The Bittersweet (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2000), 68.

Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus. A gust of godlikeness may pass through you and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible, and present. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not 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.