All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
Interpretation
Human desires are shaped by contradictions, with love and hate driving our actions.
Anne Carson's quote suggests that the complexities of human desire are based on paradoxes, where the feelings of absence and presence are in constant tension. Love and hate serve as the fundamental forces that motivate us, illustrating the duality of passion and conflict inherent in our emotional experiences.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a discussion about the complexities of relationships during a psychology class.
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.
[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
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.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. Itβs usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
I am able to follow my own death step by step. Now I move softly towards the end.
Human history began with an act of disobedience and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience.
What is more absurd and more impious than to attribute the name of Lucifer to the devil, that is, to personified evil. The intellectual Lucifer is the spirit of intelligence and love; it is the paraclete, it is the Holy Spirit, while the physical Lucifer is the great agent of universal magnetism.
Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.
Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens.... My grandfather would say we're part of something incredibly wonderful - more marvelous than we imagine. My grandfather would say we ought to go out and look at it once in a while so we don't lose our place in it.
I believe in God, which means I am open to some absurd possibilities. But I understand the power of that faith, and I understand the metaphor of that belief.
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