I can't read Miller, it annoys me, I find myself going back to the previous line, to the next page, as if I couldn't survive without reading it and it was a vain effort to try again. I've given up, for now, and thankfully. I picked up Frank Ronan's The Men Who Loved Evelyn Cotton and was blown away. And I'm so enchanted that even though I already foresee its ending, I pause it, delaying, delaying that end that I don't want to see in the book. Skepticism assails me, even in the face of the most fantastic stories of passions and loves. Or should I say, mostly...?
Because it seems to me that, far from what I imagined seeing/living in this department, there are unusual stories of tragic and less tragic loves that are nothing like the one I experienced and that in no way sympathize with my tears. One day, I will destroy that word love, love to love and love to be loved. It is necessary to deconstruct it and rebuild it. Maybe more often, maybe whenever the doubt assails us: will I love or not? Re-evaluate it, rethink it, and after each brick and mortar comes together in tune, you may need to feel it. To stop to feel, what each one feels of, for, for, like, to love. Because this thing of loving, once the first steps have been taken, the respective barriers have been broken down, must be something other than love.
And against Ronan, his insight and understanding of being a woman or a man, there is a greater understanding, as an anatomist of feeling. It is then in the mood for this reading to retreat to the attic, to shrink precepts and concepts. I decide that only Ronan could build the world in any other way. Mine, of course. I leave here an excerpt of this good omen, which will serve in the idea we have of love or, in the final analysis, in the courage to dismantle what we feel and allow ourselves the most glorious and simple love whose meaning, perhaps, may have been lost in its nuances, wanderings and changes that life imposes on us (and we may wake up tomorrow in love with a gesture or a certain look, without expecting more from it than it is: a moment of happiness).
To whet the appetite, the principle of passion:
"... He had a very unique way of concealing his humor and laughing at others in secret. I admired this trait of his. He felt that he showed self-sufficiency and a healthy distrust of humanity. I was studying architecture in Bath. It was a subject in which he had a purely ideological interest and for which he seemed to have little aptitude. Tutors said he had a great future in that profession, but at that time Bath was an old-fashioned school, where modernism still prevailed. Benedict immediately threw himself into the work with the thatch and throughout the weekend his silhouette was perched on top of the roof, next to Hugh's. In practice, it didn't help much, but it was pleasant company. Later, Hugh told me that, although he liked Benedict, he kept a certain distance from him at that time, for whatever reason escaped him. To me, this reason was obvious. And then for me, who knows the Cottons and has lived with them for so many years.
When we fall in love with another person, we think that everything around them is wonderful and unique. We are stunned by the beauty of the smallest gestures and tend to fixate on everything that we think is an individual trait of hers.
We make them our treasures, the goods we can use to make us happy or unhappy from time to time.
Then we get to know the people in your family, one by one or maybe all in one sitting. There may be no physical similarities between family members, but an expression from the mouth or a saying that is recognized will always come to the fore. For a brief moment, our eyes dilate and we feel a thrill of emotion that until then we thought could only be awakened in us by the person we love. We are so embarrassed that later we will try to deny this emotion to ourselves. I felt that way about Benedict, Evelyn's mother, and her brother. I felt it about Sarah Bliss who, although not of Evelyn's family, is extraordinarily similar to her. We come to understand that the person we love is not unique in all of their traits, but rather a unique combination of common traits. And yet we continue to love these traits, because they were most likely the first object of our love. I can therefore imagine Hugh Longford, who at that moment was not yet conscious of his love for Evelyn, sitting on the roof of the large barn next to Benedict, to observe a twitch of the mouth or a gesture of the hands and to feel momentarily attracted without knowing why, but, for his own sake, to immediately dispel this sensation, without being able, however, to help feeling a certain reserve towards Benedict.
Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps it was still too early for Hugh to be in love with Evelyn (apart from the fact that infatuation always begins long before we are aware of it) and he was just feeling a premonition of the anger Benedict would have towards him."
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