“If something is rotten or broken in me, it is my mind,” remarks philosopher Agnes Callard, recounting the story of her worst romance—an email-driven cycle of continual rejection she found herself unable to quit for several years. Quoting Socrates’s failed attempt to praise the love of someone who does not love, she locates her own problem in the madness of an Eros that is unreasoning yet violently intellectualized, the “perpetual thought” of obsession. Strung out by alternating periods of constant contact and unexplained absence from the beloved, she finds herself turning to charts, graphs, Internet stalking, PowerPoint, in order to thoroughly map and understand what on earth went wrong.
