#petrarch

In this vile world, she is the paradise I’ve desired.

“Love has set me up like a target for arrows, like snow in the sun, like wax in the fire, like a cloud in the wind;”

Heuristic imitation fails to escape fully a certain incompleteness of exchange. We meet it most visibly in the letters Petrarch addressed to his favorite ancient authors, letters that transcend whatever element of exhibitionism lay behind them and that are drenched in quixotic futility. The deep yearning of a transaction, a yearning that was by definition unquenchable, is best symbolized by the letter to Homer purporting to reply to a letter from that poet actually composed by a friend whom Petrarch had put up to it. The ancients whom he loved as friends maintained a marble or a bronze repose that could break hearts.