This itching in the wings, in the absence of the beloved, is a violent pain:
The channels through which the wings push up are dried up and closed and hinder the growth of the wing. What is inside them, full of desire but closed in, beats like a pulse in an inflamed sore; it pierces these channels like a needle. Thus the whole soul everywhere is stung (κεντουμένη) as if bitten by a gadfly and tortured. At the same time, having the memory of beauty, it is full of joy.
[When it sees the beautiful, the part where the wings are pushing is soothed], it has a respite from the prickings and the tortures, and tastes for a time the sweetest of delights.
—Plato's Phaedrus, quoted in "God in Plato," Simone Weil's fragmentary notes on Plato.
Weil: “The soul recovers a memory of the god that it followed above and whose image it sees in the beloved. ... The lover tries to make the beloved as much like this god whose memory he has found again as possible, and when the beloved responds to this love, there is established between the two of them a friendship founded on a common participation in divine things.”
