溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Is Unfillable Desire Love, or a Sickness?
Is a craving no nearness can fill a sign of love, or love's trap?
Toward the wound one leans, longing to pour oneself out.
Following his teacher Epicurus, Lucretius diagnosed the passion of love as a sickness that shatters the mind's peace, and this bred a deep divergence over love's worth. The Stoics and Epicureans saw passionate love as a disturbance to be governed, prizing the calmer affection of friendship. Plato read the same unfillability in the opposite way: that very craving, he held, is the wing that pushes us up toward higher beauty. Later Romanticism took the wound itself as love's badge of honor. Is unfillable craving a sickness to govern or an ascending force to embrace? The question still divides the heart that seeks calm from the heart that affirms longing.
Before a love that makes us want endlessly more, Lucretius's question — is this sickness or love — still stops us, two thousand years on.
Lucretius dissects love coldly: lovers, though they embrace and press flesh to flesh, never become one.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Lucretius dissects love coldly: lovers, though they embrace and press flesh to flesh, never become one. The more they try to fill it, the larger the craving grows — a wound, he calls it, that cannot be filled. He counsels wariness of this fever. I find the diagnosis coldly precise, yet feel it misses something. That love is never fully filled is true. But is that unfillability only a sickness, or the very heart that keeps love alive? Before that unfillable place, I hesitate too.
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