Arendt delineates the crucial Augustinian distinction between cupiditas—the love of worldly goods for their ministration to one's immediate desires—and caritas—the love of eternal goods and especially of God, a love which then enables us to love earthly things rightly. For those possessed by cupiditas, earthly life is a tragedy of accumulation, for the things and people they acquire or control cannot satisfy the desire for eternal happiness that animates their errant love. Even worse for the prisoners of cupiditas, life's intractable brevity implies no horizon beyond the grave, and so the avoidance of death, "transformed into the worst evil," compels the most desperate and even horrific conduct. While she must have remembered the sting of cupiditas in her futile love for Heidegger, Arendt seems to have recognized the outlines of caritas in their philosophical communion.

The temptation of uti [use], of the dealing-with, in the cupiditas oblectando (in carne) [lust of entertainment (in the flesh)], taking-delight-in, comfort, calculation of significance, pretending-to-oneself, more precisely: pretending one significance before the other one and, in this, wriggling oneself out of the noose. (Direction: letting the significance force itself upon oneself.) Saving oneself in the uncovering and ascertaining of one possibility of delight, even if that were one's own neediness and uncertainty.

P. 193

Just an instant ago! You were here among curtains,
wooden tables, mouth glowing, wet soil,
the wine-stained cups, torches lit with sputter
and smoke, shaken just to make them burn.

You discerned me in thie crevice; you came
blinding and able, hazy but firm,
my knotted dress no hinderance up the steep path.

I endured that glance--triumphant, singular--
it, too, now submerging, now disapeared
to where I might slip through now, and live on.

¶ 4:21 PM