set for a bait; and they are never caught. All
other men greedily seize and devour it, like bumpkins eating their
cabbage, and are caught. Only the erotic nature fully appreciates the
dainties set out for bait - he prizes them infinitely. Woman divines
this, and for that reason there is a secret understanding between him
and her. But he knows also that she is a bait, and that secret he keeps
to himself.
That nothing more marvelous, nothing more delicious, nothing more
seductive than woman can be devised, for that vouch the gods and their
pressing need which heightened their powers of invention; for that
vouches also the fact they risked all and, in shaping her, moved heaven
and earth.
I now forsake the myth. The conception "man" corresponds to his "idea."
I can, therefore, if necessary, think of an individual man as existing.
The idea of woman, on the other hand, is so general than no one single
woman is able to express it completely. She is not contemporaneous with
man (and hence of less noble origin), but a later creation, though more
perfect than he. Whether now the gods took some part from him whilst he
slept, from fear of waking him by taking too much, or whether they
bisected him and made woman out of the one half - at any rate it was man
who was partitioned. Hence she is the equal of man only after this
partition. She is a delusion and a snare, but is so only afterward, and
for him who is deluded. She is finiteness incarnate; but in her first
stage she is finiteness raised to the highest degree in the deceptive
infinitude of all divine and human illusions. As yet, there is no
deception - one instant longer, and one is deceived.
She is finiteness, and as such she is a collective: one woman represents
all women. Only the erotic nature comprehends this and therefore knows
how to love many without ever being deceived, sipping the while all the
delights the cunning gods were able to prepare. For this reason, as I
said, woman cannot be fully express
.
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