When everything feels newly alive
Plato, Barthes, and Neruda follow the charge of desire without pretending intensity can tell you what comes next.
A person, place, or piece of work has made the world unusually bright, and you want company that can match the feeling without flattering it.
Reaching for love-and-high writing that flatters the feeling — pop poetry, romantic playlists set to text, social-media verse — and missing that the great writers of euphoria all knew that the high is an accurate response to the world becoming more visible, not a malfunction to be enjoyed and forgotten. Or the opposite failure: reaching for cynical literature that tries to talk you down, and missing the chance to learn what an electric state is worth attending to.
Books in order
- The Symposium — Read all the speeches, in order. Resist the urge to skip to Socrates. The earlier speakers are doing necessary work — they are showing you the wrong shapes of the question love is asking — and Diotima's account, when it arrives, only lands because the earlier speeches have prepared the room for it.
- A Lover's Discourse: Fragments — Roland Barthes assembling a lover's vocabulary — waiting, jealousy, the absent one, the embrace — in alphabetical fragments. Read it as the most accurate single record in modern literature of what an electric state actually feels like from the inside, hour by hour. The structure is the form: love is not a narrative, it is a vocabulary one ends up living inside.
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair — Neruda at twenty. The body, the night, the woman, the sea. Read in a parallel-text edition if you can; the Spanish does work the English can only suggest. The poems are the high in language, and reading them aloud lets the rhythm carry the same charge the lover is feeling.
Further reading
- Love in the Time of Cholera — García Márquez's long novel of a love that survives fifty-one years, nine months, and four days of waiting. Read it after the high has cooled a little; the novel knows what the high is and what comes after, and it refuses to make either of them small.
- La Vita Nuova — Dante in his twenties, writing the prose-and-verse account of his love for Beatrice. The young poet at the moment he is figuring out that love is going to be the form of his thinking. Read it after Symposium; the European literary tradition of love as a form of cognition starts here, in compact and exquisite form.
- If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho — Anne Carson's translation of the Sappho fragments. The earliest surviving Western lyric voice on what desire feels like, in pieces, with the silences left in. Read it whenever; the form of the book — fragments and gaps — is itself the form the high has when memory tries to write it down.
- The Rules of Attraction — Cynical or transactional accounts of attraction, dating advice, or any book that tries to instrument the feeling. Save them for a colder season; right now the high deserves the writers who took it seriously, not the writers who treated it as a market.