Manikon Eros

Description

This is a book about desire. Human beings have been defined in many ways: as rational animals, as tool-making bipeds, as beings born to believe, as things subject to decay. This book claims that we are creatures of desire. Manihon erosis the Greek for mad, crazy love. That is the way we are inclined to love one another and that is the way we love and are loved by a very unusual God. Without love we can miss the point. Learning how to love is learning how to be ourselves. It can make us or break us. Whatever we love is loved with the same heart, the same body, the same sexual energy, otherwise it is not we who do the loving. Desire is what we are at our deepest. lt is the quick of our being. It is what makes the heart miss a beat. Following this to where we are at means tracking ourselves down to that most secret hiding-place, surprising ourselves in the act. Unless we do so, we can construct a life For ourselves that is way off the mark, and however famous, successful, wealthy and admired, it can be nothing more than a monument to our own misalignment. Unless our life is built in, through and out of the reality of desire, it is likely to be unsatisfying to us, however much it may impress other people. This book is an attempt to examine desire in its source, its movement and its object, whether that object be a human or a divine lover. In the end we shall be judged on how we have loved.