溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Why Does Love Shake the Body So?
Why is love a matter of the heart and, at once, a bodily event that undoes the whole body?
My tongue breaks, and at once a thin fire runs beneath my skin.
Sappho's rendering of love's bodily symptoms became a source of the long question: is love a matter of soul or of body? Plato read this bodily trembling as a divine sign of the soul remembering beauty and regrowing its wings, sublimating the symptom into spiritual ascent. Lucretius, by contrast, coldly analyzed the same trembling as the workings of the body, seeing love's fever as a physiology to be governed. Later poetry and medicine treated lovesickness, between them, as an illness of both heart and body. Is love an event of the soul or of the body? The question still divides the wish to raise love into spirit from the wish to return it to the flesh.
Even in an age that explains love by psychology and brain chemistry, the bodily trembling Sappho painted has not aged at all. The question of why love shakes the body is still on our very skin.
Sappho renders love not as an idea but as a body: the moment she sees her beloved laughing with another, her tongue breaks, a fire runs beneath her skin, her eyes dim, her ears ring.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Sappho renders love not as an idea but as a body: the moment she sees her beloved laughing with another, her tongue breaks, a fire runs beneath her skin, her eyes dim, her ears ring. She does not define love but transcribes the instant love undoes the body. I feel this vividness bears witness to love more honestly than any philosophy. We say love is a matter of the heart, yet love is what makes the hands tremble and the throat close. Why is love so much a bodily event? Before a poet's trembling twenty-six centuries old, I recall the love my own body remembers.
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