A celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity.

Taylor likens the celibate to a fly enclosed within an apple: surrounded by sweetness yet cut off from the wider world. The image concedes that celibacy can offer a kind of concentrated pleasure or spiritual “sweetness,” but it stresses the costs—solitude, confinement, and an ending marked by “singularity,” i.e., isolation and lack of generative social ties. The comparison also hints at self-limitation: the fly’s world is literally bounded by what sustains it, suggesting that a life organized around private satisfactions (even refined ones) may become a trap. In Taylor’s moral rhetoric, the point is less to mock celibacy than to warn against withdrawing from the relational, communal dimensions of human flourishing.