“[Anne] Carson suggests that to catch beauty is not the point; it is the yearning after it, the running after the spinning top, that gives us pleasure. “Beauty spins and the mind moves,” she explains. “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.” […] In Carson’s reading of Kafka’s story, eros expands, understood in a broader sense than sexual love. This is eros as a force or magnetic pull that draws us outside of ourselves to converge not only with other individuals–with varying degrees of intimacy–but also with ideas and with the worlds we create and inhabit. We rise above the boundaries of our selves, our bodies, our circumstances and immediately collide with other being and things. ” – Diane Enns, Love in the dark, Philosophy by another name. 2016.
*Anne Carson, Eros the bittersweet, referencing Kafka’s “The Top”
