Desire seems to the lover to demolish time in the instant when it happens, and to gather all other moments into itself in unimportance. Yet, simultaneously, the lover perceives more sharply than anyone else the difference between the 'now' of his desire and all other moments called 'then' that line up before and after it. One of those moments called 'then' contains his beloved. That moment pulls at his attention, vertiginously, by love and hate at once: we can feel something like this vertigo in the poem of Sophokles about melting ice. The lover's real desire, as we see in that handful of ice, is to elude the certainties of physics and float in the ambiguities of a space-time where absent is present and 'now' can include 'then' without ceasing to be 'now.'