A fable about love

If we started counting the songs, poems, novels, movies, paintings and all other forms of expression that have referred to the love of a couple, we would never finish. It is a topic that seems endless, because a new way of understanding it, of saying it, always appears. From the candid manifestations of romanticism, to the controversial revelations of the Marquis de Sade or Anais Nin.

Nowadays, the idea of love as “a lifeline” has made a name for itself. to hold on to, in times where everything sinks and everything is renewed as if nothing had happened. The love of a couple is the promised oasis, even if it becomes a battlefield.

It is also the reaffirmation of one’s own self, even if it means getting lost a little in that other self that we love. It is sometimes the occasion to unleash our cynicism or our sarcasm, in the face of a life that we consider unhappy. Or our nihilism, if we believe that it is not worth believing.

Love as a couple is considered one of the essential goals of life

What is enigmatic about a feeling that just a few centuries ago did not arouse anyone’s curiosity?

The legend of Charlemagne

If you ask me, my favorite story about love was written by Italo Calvino, in the form of a little legend and referring to the great warrior of all time. He says like this:

“The Emperor Charlemagne fell in love, when he was already old, with a German girl. The nobles of the court were very concerned because the sovereign, possessed of amorous ardor and forgetful of royal dignity, was neglecting the affairs of the Empire.
When the girl died suddenly, the dignitaries breathed a sigh of relief, but for a short time, because Charlemagne’s love had not died with her. The Emperor, who had had her embalmed corpse brought to her chamber, did not want to part with it. Archbishop Turpín, frightened by this macabre passion, suspected an enchantment and wanted to examine the corpse.
Hidden under the dead tongue he found a ring with a precious stone. As soon as the ring was in Turpin’s hands, Charlemagne hurried to bury the body and poured his love into the person of the archbishop. To escape the embarrassing situation, Turpin threw the ring into Lake Constance. Charlemagne fell in love with Lake Constance and never wanted to leave its shores again.

It is obvious Calvino’s intention to give a new reading to the ardor of love. He does not even name the lucky damsel who was initially the object of such passion. “A German girl,” she says just herself. Then she gets lost in the labyrinths of the absurd: a famous warrior who venerates a corpse and has it embalmed.

Does it suggest to us that love does not respond to the practical demands of reason? That disregards the limits of sanity and behaves like the inevitable entry into the world of the irrational? From the unconscious, perhaps?

Finally, he gives us the greatest revelation: love is inscribed in the order of the magical. And it has more to do with ourselves and our inner demons than with the object towards which we direct the feeling.

Read Also: 8 signs you are in a rebound relationship

The coordinates of love

If you define yourself as romantic and you are eternally nostalgic for love, it is likely that at this point you feel uncomfortable. Love is mostly a certain suffering, but “a rich suffering” that no one wants to get rid of.

Florentino Ariza, character in the novel Love in the time of cholera, he vigorously rejected anyone who wanted to protect him from the ember in which he increasingly wanted to consume himself. Love moves in that logic and that is why it shakes the foundations of our lives, when he presents himself as someone who does not want the thing…

If there is something valuable about this feeling, it is that it leaves us right on the edge of the abyss where we sometimes feel like falling.. He allows us to look the emptiness face to face and reminds us that “if God gave us life only to take it away, instead he gave us love so that we could be fulfilled” (poorly paraphrasing a poem by Juan Manuel Roca).

Love leaves us right on the edge of the abyss

Where then is the legend that Italo Calvino designed with such mastery? Perhaps in the great paradox that inhabits us. In the infinite loneliness that each of us carries like a mark and in the illusion of overcoming it, with which he draws himself.

In the truth of our destiny as individuals and in the never-fulfilled promise of being one with another human being. Perhaps in the same enigmatic sentence with which Pablo Picasso elucidated the reason for being of art: “a lie that brings us closer to the truth”.