Temptation

Eros's warnings to Psyche can be applied to many situations of the slow assault of a growing temptation -

"Fortune...threatens you with mortal danger....Don't you see the danger that threatens you?  Fortune is now engaging your outposts, and if you do not stand very firmly on your guard she will soon be grappling with you hand to hand....the day of reckoning and the last chance are here...the enemy arrayed in arms against you; they have marched out and drawn up their line, and sounded the trumpet call; with drawn sword..."

Apuleius
The Golden Ass

Eros

Modern Western Society tends to limit erotic love to the purely physical, but the classical conception was broader than that.  When the tern accuses Eros of neglecting his godly duties, his absence doesn't result in a lessened physical drive in humanity -

"there is no pleasure anywhere, no grace, no charm, everything is rough, savage, uncouth.  There are no more marriages, no more mutual friendships, no children's love, nothing but endless squalor and repellent, distasteful, and sordid couplings."

Apuleius
The Golden Ass

Eros, in its fullest and deepest sense, is so much more than the sating of physical appetite. Much that our society terms "erotic" lacks the grace, charm, refinement, friendship, love, and commitment that mark the best that Eros offers. 

The power of concentrated effort

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull."

Shakespeare
All's Well That Ends Well

The politics of the disinterested observer

"We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon."

Shakespeare
King Lear

I've always found the phrase "as if we were God's spies" evocative.

Lear's progress

I finished Lear this week.  I was touched again by Lear's progress from a self centered, shallow man to a deeper, more compassionate, aware and thoughtful human being.  I'm always caught by that bittersweet turning point in the storm where he first begins to think about the ills of others.  First the fool -

"Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?"

And then a broader consideration for all the poor -

"Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this."

As it does for all of us, the growing awareness of needs we might have meet brings remorse.

The two poles of my intellectual life

"The debate the two men [Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem] conducted...ultimately concerned nothing less than the question of how to create the most profound life work possible - how to avoid misspending one's time on earth.  Do we mine down as deep as we can go into the shaft of our own personal origins?  Or do we strive to disseminate our energies and insights as broadly as possible  across the panorama of human production?"

George Prochnik
Stranger in a Strange Land

Gershom Scholem - Zionism and Utopianism

"The building of the land of the Bible and the foundation of the State of Israel represent, if you will allow me to use a daring formulation, a utopian retreat of the Jews into their own history," Scholem wrote.  He considered an exclamation by the philosopher Hermann Cohen against the Zionists - "Those fellows want to be happy!" - the most profound statement made by an opponent of the movement.

George Prochnik
Stranger in a Strange Land