And yet something of Voltaire’s teachings must have taken secret root. Four years after the victory of Rossbach that won Friedrich the epithet “Great,” the king, aged thirty-nine, reverted to his early literary ambitions and composed a poetic fable which he called “Le Conte du violon” (The Tale of the Fiddle). Jotted down in Breslau, far from the quiet and beauty of Sanssouci, in the last days of 1751, it tells the story of a gifted fiddler who is asked to play on only three strings, then two, then one, and finally on none, with the obvious results. The fable ends like this:
Through this story, if it please you,
May you now this wisdom glean:
That however skilled you may be
Art falls short without the means.
The Gates of Paradise
“Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7
ONE OF THE OLDEST VERSIONS of Beauty and the Beast, told in Latin by Apuleius sometime in the second century, is the story of a princess ordered by an oracle to become the wife of a dragon. Fearing for her life, dressed in mourning, abandoned by her family, she waited at the top of a mountain for her winged husband. The monster never came. Instead, a breeze lifted her and bore her down into a peaceful valley, in which stood a house of gold and silver. Disembodied voices welcomed her, and offered her food and drink, and sang to her. When night fell, no lights were lit, and in the darkness she felt someone near her. “I am your lover and your husband,” a voice said, and mysteriously she was no longer afraid. The princess lived with her unseen spouse for many days.
One evening, the voices told her that her sisters were approaching the house, searching for her, and she felt a great desire to see them once again and tell them of the wonderful things that had taken place. The voices warned her not to go, but her longing was too great. Crying out their names, she hurried to meet them. At first the sisters seemed overjoyed, but when they heard her story they cried and called her a fool for allowing herself to be deceived by a husband who required the cover of darkness. “There must be something monstrous about him, if he will not show himself to you in the light,” they said, and felt pity for her.
That night, steeling herself for a hideous revelation, the princess lit an oil lamp and crept to where her husband was sleeping. What she saw was not a dragon, but a young man of extraordinary beauty, breathing softly into the pillow. Overjoyed, she was about to extinguish the lamp, when a drop of hot oil fell on the sleeper’s left shoulder. He awoke, saw the light, said not a word, and fled.
Eros vanishes when Psyche tries to perceive him.
As an adolescent, reading about Eros and Psyche one hot afternoon at home in Buenos Aires, I didn’t believe in the moral of the story. I was convinced that in my father’s almost unused library, where I had found so many secret pleasures, I would find, by magic chance, the startling and unspoken thing that crept into my dreams and was the butt of schoolyard jokes. I wasn’t disappointed. I glimpsed Eros through the chiffonnerie of Forever Amber, in a tattered translation of Peyton Place, in certain poems of Federico García Lorca, in the sleeping-car chapter of Alberto Moravia’s The Conformist, which I read haltingly at thirteen, in Roger Peyrefitte’s Particular Friendships.
And Eros didn’t vanish.
When a couple of years later I was able to compare my readings to the actual sensation of my hand brushing for the first time over my lover’s body, I had to admit that for once, literature had fallen short. And yet the thrill of those forbidden pages remained. The panting adjectives, the brazen verbs were perhaps not useful to describe my own confused emotions, but they conveyed to me, then and there, something brave and astonishing and unique.
This uniqueness, I was to discover, brands all our essential experiences. “We live together, we act on, and react to, one another,” wrote Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, “but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.” Even in the moment of greatest intimacy, the erotic act is a solitary act.
Throughout the ages, writers have attempted to make this solitude a shared one. Through ponderous hierarchies (essays on gender etiquette, texts of medieval love courts), through mechanics (lovemaking manuals, anthropological studies), through examples (fables, novels, poems), every culture has sought to comprehend the erotic experience in the hope that perhaps, if it is faithfully depicted in words, the reader may be able to relive it or even learn it, in the same way that we expect a certain object to preserve a memory or a monument to bring the dead to life.
It is amazing to think how distinguished a universal library of this wishful erotic literature would be. It would include, I imagine, the Platonic dialogues in which Socrates discusses the types and merits of love; Ovid’s Arsamatoria of imperial Rome, in which Eros is considered a social function, like table manners; the Song of Songs, in which the loves of King Solomon and the black Queen of Sheba become reflections of the world around them; the Hindu Kama Sutra and the Kalyana Malla, in which pleasure is regarded as an element of ethics; the Arcipreste de Hita’s Book of Loving Well in fourteenth-century Spain, which pretends to draw its wisdom from popular sources; the fifteenth-century Perfumed Garden of Sheik al-Nefzawi, which codifies the erotic acts according to Islamic law; the German Minnereden, or medieval amatory discourses, in which love, like politics, is given its own rhetoric; and poetic allegories such as the Roman de la rose in France and The Faerie Queene in Britain, in which the abstract noun Love acquires once again, as Eros had, a human or divine face.
There would be other, even stranger works, in this ideal library: the ten-volume novel Clélie (1654–60), by Mademoiselle de Scudéry, which includes the Carte de tendre, a map charting the erotic course with its rewards and perils; the writings of the marquis de Sade, who, in prolix and tedious catalogues, noted the sexual variations to which a human group can be subjected; the theoretical books of his near-contemporary Charles Fourier, who devised entire utopian societies centered around the sexual activities of its citizens; the intimate journals of Giacomo Casanova, Ihara Saikaku, Benvenuto Cellini, Frank Harris, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, and John Rechy, all of whom tried to recapture Eros in autobiographical memoirs.