Carson is narrating Plato's most seductive move, and it is worth pausing on exactly what that move does. The pain of falling in love — that ache which seems to arrive from nowhere and refuses to resolve — gets reframed as natal sensation, the sprouting of something that was always there, pointing back toward a place of wholeness the soul once occupied. Pain becomes evidence of ascent. The disorientation of desire becomes the beginning of what you mean to be.

Notice what has been accomplished. The longing itself — raw, directionless, capable of humiliating you — is absorbed into a recovery narrative. You are not suffering; you are growing wings. The wound that opened when you saw a beautiful face is retroactively signed as spiritual progress. Plato does not ignore desire; he is far too shrewd for that. He colonizes it. He takes the momentum of *eros* — everything Carson has already shown us about the third thing that appears in the space between self and beloved, that tearing awareness of incompleteness — and routes it upward, toward the gods, toward the infinite elation of looking at reality all the time.

What gets left behind in that routing is the specific gravity of the longing itself. The wound as wound. The hunger that does not, in fact, resolve into wings.