Some mysteries are undeniable yet defy full explanation: gravity, consciousness… and eroticism — that magnetic force, elusive and unpredictable. Like death, eroticism never announces when it will catch up with you.
The philosopher Georges Bataille defined eroticism as “assenting to life up to the point of death.” For him, eroticism went beyond both sexuality and sensuality. It was an experience that made us feel fully alive, sometimes so intensely that the boundaries of everyday life and the walls between us briefly dissolved.
Sensuality engages us through the senses; eroticism takes us into deeper existential territory, disturbing our sense of where we end and the world begins. It draws us toward the tensions running through existence — pleasure and pain, connection and separation, life and death. It’s another form of dissonance: the friction between opposites that generates meaning.
I wish I could time-travel and pick the guy’s brain over espresso at Café de Flore — or better yet, right here beneath Rodin’s The Thinker. The naked figure, stripped of social roles and possessions, seems caught in a raw state of existential inquiry. His heavy, slumped posture, clenched foot, and arched back suggest a mind wrestling with the ultimate questions: meaning, mortality, nothingness… and perhaps eroticism.
Bataille saw eroticism as a psychological quest haunted by death. At its most intense, eroticism can bring us to the edge of our individual identity, where surrendering our usual sense of self feels a bit like a small death — la petite mort. The French use this phrase as a metaphor for orgasm, an experience in which the ego may momentarily recede, offering a fleeting sense of crossing into something larger than our separate existence.
Think of an experience in which you dissolved — and not only in the arms of a lover.
The one that comes to mind for me happened in Japan. I had spent some time inside Kennin-ji Temple in Kyoto, mesmerized by the two dragons writhing across its ceiling in a dance of cosmic fury. When I stepped outside and wandered down a path of rust-colored leaves, I could almost feel the dragons still hovering above me.
Then I passed a burning-red maple, half-naked, its last leaves fluttering like silk.
A breeze picked one up and carried it toward me — turning over a new leaf inside my soul. I felt intensely connected, almost one, with the tree and the world around me. Lost in the moment, I felt a thrilling jolt run up my spine: a flirtation with some inexplicable force that seemed to fuel all existence.
Paris offered its own version of that dissolution.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t The Kiss that moved me most, but The Burghers of Calais.
Six men, condemned to die to save their city.
The sculpture commemorates a real event from 1347. With Calais besieged and starving, Edward III demanded that six prominent citizens surrender themselves for execution as the price of sparing the city. According to the traditional account, Queen Philippa, moved by their plight, persuaded Edward III to spare their lives.
Rodin captures them at that unbearable threshold between life and death. I stared into their faces and suddenly felt it all: strength and fragility, anguish and grace, surrender and resistance.
Here, dissolution took a different form: not the fleeting unity I’d felt by the Japanese maple, but the terrible weight of men standing at the threshold of sacrifice. Looking at their faces, I could almost feel the dread of walking toward an uncertain fate, the courage it took to keep going, and the agonizing choice between saving yourself and giving yourself up for others. The sculpture transported me to that edge between love and annihilation — where I felt fully alive and, somehow, close to disappearing.
“Live… and remember death.”
The ancient admonition surfaced in my mind.
Perhaps the point isn’t fear, but urgency: the awe of being fully here, fully now, with the shadow of the end lending intensity to everything that lives.
And yet.
Back in the courtyard to pay one more nod to The Thinker, I saw a man holding out a roll of toilet paper toward the statue. His hundred-watt smile was most likely overexposing his friend’s shot.
Hilarious.
There’s humor in eroticism, too. Perhaps that’s why our relationship with it can feel like a divine comedy.
The sad part? We’re so easily distracted that we risk missing those moments when the Universe flirts with us — catching us off guard and filling us with awe.
And that’s a shame.
A Sphinx has riddles.
So do men.
Where we begin,
we also end —
in the pause
between breaths.
From page to thread — a story you can wear
