\section{Plato}

\lettrine[lraise=0.15]{P}{lato} examined Erōs in depth. 
In his \textit{Symposium}, the wise woman Diotima describes it not as mere attraction but as a daimōn\footnote{Nothing like a ``demon''} --- an intermediary force between mortal and Divine, always lacking, always seeking, never finally satisfied. Born of Poverty and Resource, it inherits both.

Diotima's ladder ascends from the love of a beautiful body, to the love of beautiful souls, to the love of beauty in knowledge and direct experience, to Beauty Itself --- eternal, inexhaustible, the source of all particular beauties. Erōs is what impels the ascent. It is never satisfied at any rung, because no particular beautiful thing is Beauty itself.

The horizon keeps moving. By design.

In his \textit{Phaedrus}, Plato adds what it actually feels like to be seized by genuine Longing. He calls it ``divine madness'' --- \textit{theia mania} (``Thigh-uh mah-NEE-ah''). Not pathology. Not dysfunction, but a form of possession by something larger than the ordinary self. The soul, encountering beauty, remembers the eternal Beauty it glimpsed before incarnation. It is undone. The soul's wings begin to grow again, painfully, like new teeth.

Divine madness. Beethoven spending the last two decades of his life writing music he could never hear. Einstein laboring for 10 years to solve General Relativity. Van Gogh who didn't sell a single painting in his lifetime.

Plato was the first to name what these have in common: being seized by something real, at a cost to everything merely ordinary.

That is capital-L Longing from the inside.
