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# Posted 4:34 AM by Patrick Belton

LUST: IT'S NOT JUST FOR CLERGY ANY MORE: Lucky in cards (or Russian roulette, for you in the Volokh side of the blogosphere), but unlucky in love? Finding that your love life has gone straight from Valentine's Day to Lenten abstinence? Then you might read Nicholas Blincoe's review of Simon Blackburn's expertly treatise on lust, part of an OUP and New York Public Library series on the seven mortal sins. ("One wonders what the other six contributions to the series are like ...'Gluttony: without it, I would be only half the man I am,' 'Anger: better out than in,' or 'Sloth: wake me up when it's over.'"). A few furtive glances:

[In the Symposium, as the hours drag on] we learn that the real object of desire is not young men but rather elderly ones, and our ultimate aim is not pleasure but wisdom. One sees why everyone at the symposium was drunk: they had to be legless to swallow Plato's argument, as the great philosopher clumsily substituted one object for another, until he ... made the squat septuagenarian Socrates the pin-up boy of ancient Athens.

At this point, I would like to call expert witness Shaun Ryder of the Happy Mondays, who sang "Son, I'm 30. I only went with your mother 'cause she's dirty." Blackburn finds even more eloquent voices, like that of Edna St Vincent Millay, a poet of the 1920s who provided a role model for Dorothy Parker. Millay's sonnet number 61 admits a lover's proximity had led her to "feel a certain zest/ To bear your body's weight upon my breast", but adds, "let me make it plain:/ I find this frenzy insufficient reason/ For conversation when we meet again."

Read on, and you can discover Blackburn's concept, in reading Hobbes, of "fungibility", "which frankly sounds more like something caught from sex than a concept to help explain it."

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