All’s Well That Ends

Just across the street from my apartment is a path through the woods. Although this is a place of retreat – where people come to get away from work and home alike – absorption rather than distraction seems to be the prevailing mood. Punctuating the path are wooden benches, many of them donated in memory of a spouse or a parent who was once nourished by time spent here. One bench has been sponsored by a living couple in recognition of their long marriage. The inscription features the two names, the date of the wedding, and the last stanza of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’:

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.

Most of the poem remains poised on the brink of some sort of metaphysical investment – whether in God or in the imagination’s transcendence – but these closing lines pull back. The world can offer its own kind of fulfilment. For Stevens, the sufficiency of lived experience is not registered within an individual mind, but rather by a couple. What exists here and now may not be everything, but finitude feels like enough when it is shared.

Love offers consolation in the face of mortality, even as it makes the prospect of leaving life behind more painful. Or, to make the same point in a more paradoxical way: our care for others depends upon the fact that they will die. Martin Hägglund’s Dying for Time and Ramie Targoff ’s Posthumous Love, two recent, brilliant contributions to a growing body of scholarship on the literary history of human transience, question the assumption that a longing for immortality animates every experience of desire, positing that eros and eternity might even be incompatible.

Although the subtitle of Hägglund’s book evinces an interest in modernist fiction, he is just as concerned with a theoretical tradition that begins with Socrates and continues through Jacques Lacan, both of whom, he contends, misconstrue the nature of love. We do not experience desire because of what we lack (immortality for Socrates, the Thing for Lacan), but rather because of our resistance to losing what we have: ‘The fear of time and death does not stem from a metaphysical desire to transcend temporal life. On the contrary, it is generated by the investment in a life that can be lost. It is because one is attached to a temporal being … that one fears losing it.’ As a result, to escape from a mortal condition would destroy our ability to care either for ourselves or for anyone else. Whereas Platonism has generally made love the worldly accomplice of eternity (think of Diotima’s ladder in The Symposium), Hägglund argues that the suspension of mortal threats to our attachments would pre-empt any need for those attachments in the first place.

Targoff ’s study of Petrarchism’s fate in early modern English poetry identifies the Reformation as a crucial phase in the transition away from a Platonic model of desire. She traces the great florescence of love poetry in the period – from sonnet sequences to carpe diem lyrics – to a constraint placed on the Protestant imagination. Whereas a synthesis of ancient philosophy and Roman Catholic theology made it possible for Italian Renaissance poets to depict love continuing after death and being renewed in heaven, the English writers who inherited this tradition had to contend with the fact that their own confession restricted marriage – along with all other human bonds – to the mortal world. ‘The result of denying posthumous love was not a negative void or lack where there had once been something positive and affirming’, however, Targoff explains. Instead, once desire was limited to the span of a life, it became more precious, intense...