Topic

Admiration

Admiration in this collection is closely shadowed by desire, and the two are not always cleanly separable. The opening anonymous proverb — in the eyes of a lover, pockmarks are dimples — is both a description of love and a warning about the epistemology of admiration: we see best what we want to see. Hugo's compliment-through-a-veil is perhaps the most beautiful image in the database: admiration that cannot quite reach its object is still a form of contact. Homer's parallel-souls-keeping-house entry makes admiration a prerequisite for marriage: the agreement to see each other clearly and still choose to stay is the finest thing Homer can imagine. Longfellow's first consciousness of love describes how admiration transforms into something irreversible. Bradley's observation — the secret of happiness is to admire without desiring, and that is not happiness — is the collection's most structurally perverse entry: to admire purely is impossible, and its impossibility is what makes happiness real. Shaw's Osgood entry on babies rounds the collection out with the particular amazement of new parenthood, which may be the most reliable form of human admiration on record.