View Single Post
  #8  
Unread 04-25-2017, 12:33 AM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
Posts: 8,307
Default

Definitions of love vary widely. The Greeks tried to narrow things down with their four different words for four different kinds of love--C.S. Lewis wrote about this. But even from a classical perspective, the difference between love and lust seems to be in the eye of the beholder.

It seems clear to me that we don't have much choice over whom or what we find sexually attractive. (Cupid's carelessness or naughtiness with his arrows, from which not even the king of the gods was immune, is an obvious classical metaphor for this.) The best we can manage is some level of conscious control over whether we will pursue what attracts us, and if so, how.

The subconscious still has an unruly will of its own, though. Witness Chip Livingston's excruciatingly awkward "Nocturnal Admissions".

I like how Bill Knott discusses a lack of sexual chemistry in "The Consolations of Sociobiology":

Quote:
—Then you explained your DNA calls for
Meaner genes than mine and since you are merely

So to speak its external expression etcet
Ergo among your lovers I’ll never be ...

[...]

                              I see: it’s not you
Who is not requiting me, it’s something in you
Over which you have no say says no to me.
Reply With Quote