And if beauty is terror, then what is desire?

"-Death is the mother of beauty
-And what is beauty?
-Terror
-Well said, beauty is never soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming...And if beauty is terror then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we only have one. What is it?
-To live.
-To live forever....

-All truly civilized people- the ancients no less than us- have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self...And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake.

-Why?

-Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely...

The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism...

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to soul like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal. These are powerful mysteries."

Donna Tartt, "The Secret History"