Trouble

Philosophers often describe love from the outside, but Agnes could provide an inside account. Her expe­rience had prompted her to reinterpret a famous speech, in the Symposium, in which Socrates, whom she consid­ers her role model, argues that the high­est kind of love is not for people but for ideals. She was troubled by Socra­tes’ unerotic and detached view of love, and she proposed that he was actually describing how two lovers aspire to embody ideals together. True lovers, she explained, don’t really want to be loved for who they are; they want to be loved because neither of them is happy with who he or she is. “One of the things I said very early on to my beloved was this: ‘I could completely change now,’”she recounted.“Radical change, becoming a wholly other person, is not out of the question. There is suddenly room for massive aspiration.”