craving - aversion -> pain and sorrow

Every craving is tied to a definite object, 

and it takes this object to spark the craving itself, 

thus providing an aim for it. Craving is determined

 by the definitely given thing it seeks, just as a movement

 is set by the goal toward which it moves.

 For, as Augustine writes, love is

 "Once we have the object our desire ends, unless we are threatened

 with its loss. In that case the desire to have turns into a fear of losing."

So long as we desire temporal things, 

we are constantly under this threat, 

and our fear of losing always corresponds to our desire to have. 

Temporal goods originate and perish independently of man,

 who is tied to them by his desire. Constantly bound by craving

 and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each

 present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, 

which we are unable to enjoy. And so,

 the future destroys the present.

The present is not determined by the future as such… 

but by certain events which we hope for or fear from the future,

 and which we accordingly crave and pursue, or shun and avoid. 

Happiness consists in possession, in having and holding our good,

 and even more in being sure of not losing it.

 Sorrow consists in having lost our good and in enduring this loss.

 However, for Augustine the happiness of having 

is not contrasted by sorrow but by fear of losing.

 The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear.

 It is not the lack of possessing 

but the safety of possession that is at stake.

A love that seeks anything safe and disposable on earth 

is constantly frustrated, because everything is doomed to die.

 In this frustration love turns about and its object becomes a negation, 

so that nothing is to be desired except freedom from fear.

 Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm 

that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future.

Even if things should last, human life does not. 

We lose it daily. As we live the years pass through us 

and they wear us out into nothingness. It seems that only

 the present is real, for “things past and things to come are not”;

 but how can the present (which I cannot measure) be real

 since it has no “space”? Life is always either no more or not yet.

 Like time, life “comes from what is not yet, passes through what is

 without space, and disappears into what is no longer.” 

Can life be said to exist at all? Still the fact is that man 

does measure time. Perhaps man possesses a “space” 

where time can be conserved long enough to be measured,

 and would not this “space,” which man carries with himself, 

transcend both life and time?




~ Hannah Arendt 

from Love and Saint Augustine

 with thanks to brainpickings