If I could go back in time and meet my younger self that night (let me at this point acknowledge that we may be on this digression in part to resolve some stuff), perhaps when I’m just getting off my bike, and put my hand on this vole’s shoulder, and tell him that I’ve come with some words of wisdom so that he won’t fumble The Glory of My Youth, I would say something like: “Look, it matters whether or not Mary has had, is having, feelings for you; it matters how she’s disposed. Of course it does. But you need to get out of your head this notion that that’s, like, the matter, the material. Some scene in which your disposition and her disposition take up positions, and you come forth and beam at each other officially over the pine needles, and someone offers ambassadorially: ‘Well how felicitous. Now we can get on with acting on said feelings, eh?’—that’s not how these things go. What you need now is exposure. Mary, I think, is actually a big girl and unconsciously understands this. You need to say something like: ‘Mary, I’ve been too shy to tell you: I think you’re so beautiful.’”

I do acknowledge that a mini-lecture is probably not the best way to advise the anxious fourteen-year-old. Probably just insisting on the last part would do. But do you begin to see what I mean? Romance has its romantic way of being, where the rule is that arousal awakens arousal.

I’m not just talking about a kind of contagiousness—that lust leads to lust in the same way that yawning spreads from person to person, without anyone meaning for this to happen. Actually that contagiousness is something that Mary and I presumably did fall into, as we basically knew—all but knew—how the other was disposed. What I’m talking about has to do fundamentally with will and enaction and, peculiarly, a sort of work. If we think of a caress or a kiss for example—aargh … sorry this is so embarrassing—the particular sensation on our cheek or lips might matter quite a bit, but it matters much more in self-consciously embodying what this person thinks they are up to. It is this enacted idea, this intention, that is excited body-to-body; and this is itself the idea of this very reciprocal erotic escalation. With romance we climb up out of mere dispositions and into that self-swallowing, seductive consciousness of arousal at arousal itself, which is emphatically what the kissers are implying and infecting each other with. Eventually she may be turned on by the fact that the fact that she wants him to be turned on turns him on. The latter sounds like a geeky philosopher’s paradox, but it is integral to the way a kiss works.