thinking abt this bit all the time wrt love in that like. how on the one hand you've got the sophocles line abt ice that's held in the hand of a child + houseman's unrequited love for his best friend that led to him loosing that friendship, indicating live as a sort of painful impermanence of something you can't keep no matter how much you want to. but then on another hand you've also got the man (stobaeus) diligently copying out for his son this part of a text about love + how that love for his son means that but of text survived long enough for housman to read it and recognize himself in and quote back to his younger self, where otherwise it would have melted away like ice. something about how love is all of these things at once, and the text about love, the love of the text, the love of the reader, and the reader in love are tied together in it. what is and isn't lost simultaneously. idk idk