That our Desire is Augmented by Difficulty

The nature of desire is to increase with resistance. Tell a child he may not touch a thing and the thing becomes, by that prohibition alone, ten times more interesting than it was when it lay accessible and unguarded. This is not a weakness peculiar to children. I observe it in myself, in men of affairs, in lovers, in the pursuits of scholars who want what other scholars have called unknowable. We are drawn toward difficulty not despite the difficulty but because of it — or rather, the difficulty and the drawing are a single thing.

Ovid knew this, and built his whole erotic philosophy upon it: the lover should feign indifference, should create obstacles, should arrange for there to be locked doors and vigilant fathers, because the unlocked door, the absent father, the consenting beloved who makes no difficulty of it — these extinguish desire as reliably as water extinguishes fire. There is a paradox here so consistent, so universal in its operation, that it must be telling us something true about the structure of appetite: it requires a future, a gap between itself and its object, something still to overcome. The desire fully satisfied is the desire destroyed.

“Difficulty gives all things their estimation; the people of a certain province, to express how much they prize a thing, say that it costs them so many men.”

This has consequences that are not all comfortable. It means that much of what we pursue we do not, at the deepest level, wish to obtain — because obtaining it would end the pursuit, and it is the pursuit that generates the feeling we have mistaken for love, or ambition, or devotion. The mystic who finally achieves the vision he has sought for thirty years of prayer is in a delicate position: he has reached the object of his desire, and desire, by its nature, cannot survive that arrival.

What we should perhaps desire is the capacity for desire itself — the appetite that finds something worth wanting, something not yet reached. That is a different project from the pursuit of particular satisfactions, and it is one that the merely acquisitive man, the man who wants to accumulate and possess and have done with it, is constitutionally unable to undertake. He will gain everything and find himself strangely empty, without quite knowing why.