so Love is sweeter and hotter
after a jealous tiff with the loved one,[124] and moreover, as some
think the Sun is kindled and extinguished, so also do people conceive of
Love as mortal and uncertain. Moreover, just as without training the
body cannot easily bear the heat of the Sun, so neither can the
untrained soul easily bear the yoke of Love, but both are equally out of
tune and suffer, for which they blame the deity and not their own
weakness. But in this respect they seem to differ, in that the Sun
exhibits to the eye things beautiful and ugly alike, whereas Love throws
its light only on beautiful things, and persuades lovers to concentrate
their attention on these, and to neglect all other things. As to those
that call Aphrodite the Moon, they, too, find some points in common
between them; for the Moon is divine and heavenly and a sort of
halfway-house between mortal and immortal, but inactive in itself and
dark without the presence of the Sun, as is the case with Aphrodite in
the absence of Love. So we may say that Aphrodite resembles the Moon,
and Love the Sun, more than any other deities, yet are not Love and the
Sun altogether the same, for just as body and soul are not the same, but
something different, so is it with the Sun and Love, the former can be
seen, the latter only felt. And if it should not seem too harsh a
saying, one might argue that the Sun acts entirely opposite to Love, for
it turns the mind away from the world of fancy to the world of reality,
beguiling us by its grace and splendid appearance, and persuading us to
seek for truth and everything else in and round it and nowhere else. For
as Euripides says,

'Too passionately do we love the Sun,
Because it always shines upon the earth,
From inexperience of another life,'[125]

or rather from forgetfulness of those things which Love brings to our
remembrance. For as when we are woke by a great and bright light,
everything that the soul has seen in dreams is vanished and fled, so the
Sun is wont to banish the remembrance of past changes and chances, and
to bewitch the intelligence, pleasure and admiration causing this
forgetfulness. And though reality is really there, yet the soul cleaves
to dreams and is dazzled by what is most beautiful and divine. 'For
round the soul are poured sweet yet deceiving dreams,' so that the soul
thinks everything here good and valuable, unless it obtain divine and
chaste Love as its physician and preserver.