Unrequited love of the withdrawn

For some strange(r) (non)reason I've been led back to reading Morton's latest, Realist Magic. Lo and behold, the Introduction is related to the posts on ojbet a in a way I had heretofore not seen. I had to come to them 'sideways,' as it were, to get a glimpse. Therein he talks of the melancholy we get when trying to plumb an object's depth, dolls within dolls without end. The mourning comes from never arriving at the object in question, like an unrequited love, always longing for what we can never really have. This is because at heart an object is withdrawn so we can never fully know or experience it, including ourselves. And yet this withdrawal as the object of desire nonetheless spurs us on, providing impetus to strive for it anyway, and in so doing we do learn, we do progress, we do become more in tune with that which withdraws, while accepting we can never reach it.