The first time that a friend recommended Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay to me, she said that it had shattered her idea of love. We were in second year, and I was hot off my first heartbreak with my first love. It took me another year to read it, during a time when I was falling in love again—this time with reciprocation. I understood why my friend felt the way that she did, and I also understood that, as someone in a loving relationship, I could not feel the same way. 

Eros the Bittersweet isn’t just about romantic love, it’s about romantic longing. Throughout the book, Carson brings back the concept of the three-point circuit she first observes in a poem by Sappho. Carson’s three points are the “lover, beloved, and that which comes between them.” In the poem, Sappho expresses desire for a woman, desire which is held apart from her by the man she is laughing with. Eros—or romantic love—as a concept lies in this gap. Eros is lack. None of the points in the circuit are static, they are “electrified by desire” so as to be both connected and disjointed from each other. Eros can never truly be fulfilling, you can only reach toward it. 

On a dreary day in early January, I was stuck indoors waiting out a blizzard. I decided to watch my first Ingmar Bergman movie, Winter Light, on a whim because the title was beautiful. The film itself is beautifully spare. Most of it takes place within a church, having moments of silence interspersed with some of the most elegant dialogue I have heard. It follows a pastor, Tomas Ericsson, who is disillusioned with God following his wife’s death four years prior. He attempts to advise a suicidal man, Jonas Persson, who has become disaffected with his faith after reading about the atomic bomb. Tomas can only bring himself to say trite words, he himself not believing in his appeals to faith, and Jonas dies. Meanwhile, Tomas’s ex-girlfriend Märta comforts him, scolds him, and attempts to win his love, sometimes all within the same scene. 

Sappho’s three-point circuit is evident in Winter Light, but eros expresses itself in different ways for Märta as opposed to Tomas. For Märta, on some level it could be read that “that which comes between [the lover and the beloved],” i.e. the third point, is Tomas’s dead wife. However, upon closer inspection, it is clear that the third point is actually Tomas’s “private God.” Throughout the film, Märta expresses confusion at Tomas’s faithless faith. She herself is an atheist, and doesn’t understand his allegiance to his profession despite his lack of faith. Tomas only believes in God so far as he believes that God loves him most of all, something which he shared with his late wife. His wife contained his love for God, and so once she was gone, an absence has been created. At the level of eros, this absence echoes from the past into the future, separating Tomas from fulfillment in his love for God and fulfillment in his relationship with Märta. 

At one point in the film, Tomas asks why Märta took communion. She responds “It’s a love feast, isn’t it?” This line in particular struck me, I think because I saw the difference between Tomas and Märta’s views on religion and love. For Tomas, having no unselfish view of God, communion is a religious duty and not necessarily a faithful moment. By contrast, Märta’s understanding of religion is through love, particularly a love of Jesus. Though she is an atheist, she views love itself as being fundamental to the practice of communion, and so participates in it without shame when she wishes to attend Tomas’s service. 

So where does this leave us? Are Tomas and Märta doomed to never quite fulfill their desires? If you were looking for a satisfying ending, Winter Light is not the film for you. At many points I was frustrated with Tomas’s insistence on living a mechanical life—one where passion and love turned to despair and disassociation. I was also frustrated at Märta for having so much hope, for refusing to give up, for being so much like I was after my first heartbreak. However, I never saw this as a cautionary tale. Rather, I saw beauty in the end, in their stubborn insistence on continuing as they are. It is the embodiment of eros: reaching toward the distance which they will never close. 
Although I said at the beginning of this article that I would never feel the same way as my friend, this is only because I have experienced a different kind of eros in my life. Had I read Eros the Bittersweet after my first heartbreak, I may have felt that love would always be eternally reaching for someone else, and that it was bad to do so. However, I’m not so sure about the latter anymore. Aldous Huxley says in Doors of Perception: “Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.” We may never know everything about our partners, and yet maybe it is enough simply to try to close that distance. This trying is why, despite my frustrations, I can’t help but feel affection—maybe even connection—for the situations that Tomas and Märta are in.