Love can be both intoxicating and toxic. One desires to be taken over: enveloped, dissolved, decomposed, and one desires just as strongly to retain an individual shape. For this reason, Anne Carson describes erotic love as fundamentally ambivalent in her 1986 book, Eros the Bittersweet. As she puts it, the “incursion” of Eros invades the self, disturbing its homeostasis, and the self finds this both painful and pleasurable. It is only due to incursion, after all, that the self can even recognize itself as such. When the self recognizes its boundaries, it has to reckon with them. The lover has to ask, “ ‘Once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?’ Desire changes the lover.” Carson describes this change as both bitter and sweet, borrowing these terms from a fragment of poetry by the ancient Greek writer Sappho:

Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up

The Gift’s thesis is that artistic creation is fundamentally an act of generosity, which may be accounted for by commodity systems such as the market economy but which forever evades total capture by those systems. Hyde makes (some occasionally universalizing and exoticizing) sojourns into gift theory and anthropological surveys of cultures with gift-giving economies, and analyzes the way gifts have today been commodified and funneled through philanthropic systems. Yet Hyde maintains that, despite the function of the gift in a given time and place, the gift is fundamentally unique, in that its value always increases as it circulates. The gift contains within it “the mystery of things that increase as they perish”—like compost. The gift may degrade, but it holds potential for eternal growth.