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I didn’t understand it the first time. I got a glimpse of understanding the second time. The third time things started to make sense. By the fourth time, well, that is where I’m at now.
My interpretation is that once we reach what we have desired we struggle to maintain the desired thing; just as we struggled to attain the desired thing in the first place. That the desired is attainable in our minds even if it is not attainable in reality. And that the goal is that the desired should sound within us as though we have achieved the desired. That the longing for the desired is reality whereas achieving the desired is only achievable in a dream in which we have achieved the desired.
Did anyone interpret it differently?
That is one direction you can take it. Eros must eat his children as Chronos does; desire must consume the desired. Healthful desiring consists in a double movement; the first movement being the loss of self in dream and fantasy, the second movement being a flee from the self at the frightening prospect of the dream, at least as it is realized in the moment of awakening which is only a moment. Healthful desire is desire in line with desire’s ultimate realization, which is time’s empty form: it is precisely that emptiness which allows desire to consume what is for it infinite, namely, the desired. Kierkegaard on the other hand says that with a similar separation of desire and desired, as my aphorism talks about, the desired object will disappear through a process of sublimation: desire will increase in intensity the ‘further’ it strays from the desired, engrossing itself in its own fantasies.
I think it all comes down to keeping your desires realistic…
Realistic desire is oyxmoronic.
But the essential thesis of my aphorism is that desire can in fact contain the desired. All the philosophers I have read, from the Symposium discussions to Kierkegaard, have all claimed the opposite; that it is not possible for desire to contain the desired, which is a way of saying- to attain satisfaction. In another aphorism I describe a material example of such an individual, satisfied.
Nam iracundiam & cupidenem vini, sicuti juventa irritaverat, ita senectus mitigare potusisset. –
Erycius Puteanus in Suada Attica Orationum. Page 390]
Translation: “Why should the wine of youth not sweeten with the years?”
In the end we can never possess our beloved but always only our love. Even the child-artist to whom the hand of a woman has never befallen can still cultivate in himself, as he usually does, even in remarkable phases of youth and simple childhood-- true and intense sensations of love, whose object may be however remote or imaginary; even as these stages in life may be usually reserved, not in the flowering and yielding of fruit, but in the development of the root and stalk of the tree of passion. Even more remarkable is the fact that delight in these sensations soon becomes a second nature in him, which swallows and condemns the l’ amour courtois and first nature, namely, that he take as his supreme banner of victory- a woman.
When we are looking to find happiness, the desired can be trivial, but when you’re looking to maintain ‘happiness’ (or the pleasure which you get from desire and its effects), then you need realistic desires.
When we scrutinize our own desires we can find them to be hollow. Much of life is wasted by focusing on the unachievable.
You said yourself that what the desired is itself happiness. you also posit that at the same time desire itself is enjoyable and gives people happiness. I agree with that, and i see no conflict with the views of kierkegaard.
If by scrutinizing desire or the desired we disassociate and estrange our desires (and they reduce to dreams and fantasies), how is this not a simple realization of an unrealistic desire?
It’s o.k to day dream so long as you do not obsess or follow a pipe dream.
Is it relevant that Desire, like Disaster, are astral terms? Away/from the stars. How we wonder what they are…
I guess definitions are good…
Desire is motivation… more specifically a motivation toward something someone or something has in mind.
I wouldn’t say people wonder what their desires are, they know.
One cause however for discrepancy is the fact that desires are subject to change
We know what we desire (or at least think we do).
I was thinking more in terms of wondering about what the feeling, desire, is per se. As in when one is infatuated, and is struck with the thought, “What is this I’m feeling!!”
I have images of the ancients staring at the stars and wondering about the source of their awe. A phenomenon we city dwellers have so little experience of any more.
I think as with desire and a pertinent observation about the star analogy, it is what we lack and are not feeling which comes to question.