tinct from pleasure, which affirms the self in its sovereignty, bending to its whims, whereas love affirms the self by forcing it to affirm the sov-ereignty of another being: you are of value in-deed, but largely because the Beautiful Other needs you, needs you in which to find itself reflected and made whole; needs you as a god needs its worshipper, in the very annulment of yourself before it. And the joy beauty gives is partially the joy of that brief erasure of the self's sense of its centrality and isolation, the break-ing of the boundaries between it and the world - it pulls the self through a narrow keyhole out of its palace and prison, out to the immensity of being; a material transcendence immanent with the sacred, flecked with its glittering signs.
Love, that terrible sharpener of life - sharpen-ing its pleasures with the pain of Narcissus and
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sharpening even pain with a strange euphoria, so we don't know if we are happy or in hell, suicidal or drugged with joy - love, that babbler and silent one, wounded by beauty, yet craves that beauty it feels it can't have enough of - becomes addicted to that special moment of beauty it so confuses with the object encountered in the moment, not knowing that beauty occurs in time and disappears with time and cannot be captured in any object; love even denies all others in the steadfastness of its worship - not knowing that the Beautiful Object is in fact a Beautiful Mo-ment, long or brief, and vanishes with the moment's passing.
Eros has always been a jealous god. In erotic love, we see come together beauty, our response to beauty, and the tyrannies of the self as two egos collide in a kind of ecstatic mutual admir-ation and the inevitable reaction of dismayed,
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