"Soon you'll be eighty-two. The height was shortened by six centimeters, and the weight was only forty-five kilograms. But you are as beautiful and elegant as ever, and I am touched. We've been together for fifty-eight years, and my love for you grows stronger. There is this annoying emptiness in my chest again, which can only be filled when your burning body snuggles into my arms. ”
This quote comes from a love letter written by the 84-year-old French philosopher André Goetz to his 82-year-old terminally ill wife, Dorena, in a thin little book called "To D Love History".
I didn't know about this author before, but according to online information, he is a French left-wing thinker, a student of Sartre, the most important French philosopher of the 20th century, the founder of the French political journal "Observateur Nouvelle", and one of the representatives in the field of political ecology research. These labels, and all his treatises, are certainly impossible for anyone in the non-related field to understand, but his love is enough to shock everyone who reads this love letter.
Why there is this love letter, Goetz explains at the beginning, "I need to reconstruct our love story so that I can capture the real meaning." It's our love story that makes us what we are today, born through each other and for each other. I'm writing to you this letter to understand what I've been through, what we've been through. ”Born through each other and for each other, this should be the best summary of their lifelong love
Encounters
There are quite a few depictions of dbeauty in love letters, especially in the first encounter.
Our story had a wonderful beginning, almost love at first sight. On the day we met, you were surrounded by three men and said they were going to play cards with you. You've got thick brown hair, pearl-colored skin, and the high, high-pitched voice of an English woman. ”
You are so noble, so playful—witty, almost impossible to translate into French—beautiful as a dream. "Witty, I guess she's a witty, clever and cute guy with a sense of humor.
The story continues, and the author writes: "A month later, I met you again on the street, and I was fascinated by your dancing gait. "After going out together three or four times, I was finally able to hug you. ”
We are in no hurry. I carefully take off your clothes. Reality and imagination can be so perfectly matched, and Aphrodite of Milos is vividly displayed in front of me. Your neck glows with a pearl glow that illuminates your face. For a long, long time, I silently admired this miracle full of vitality and tenderness at the same time. With you, I have come to understand that pleasure is not about getting or giving, but only when it is given to each other and can evoke the desire of the other to give. On that day, we completely surrendered ourselves to each other. ”
Goetz did not hesitate to praise him, and in his eyes, D was the embodiment of the goddess Venus.
Acquaintance
D's character, Goetz has this introduction: "In the adult world, you don't have a place for yourself. You have to be strong because your world is an unstable one. I can always feel your strength, and at the same time, I can also feel your deep vulnerability and appreciate your fragile strength. We are all children who have grown up in instability and conflict. We are destined to protect each other. We need to work together to create a place that the world has denied us. But, for this, our love must also be a contract of life. ”
Goetz mentions the contract of life more than once, and it is D who has a very good and almost philosophical answer to how to maintain this contract well, and all this is a perfect demonstration of D's wisdom. When Goetz asks, "What can prove that in ten or twenty years, we have undergone changes and that this contract of life will still satisfy our desires?" ”
D's answer convinced Goetz, who called it almost Sartre's philosophy. “If you are united with one person and intend to spend your life, you put the lives of both people together and do not do things that are detrimental to your union. Building your relationship as a couple is your joint plan, and you will always need to strengthen, change, and reorient in response to changes in your circumstances. What you do will be what you will become.
This sentence is given to all those who are about to or are in a relationship, hoping to bring some insights.
When his feelings were thwarted by Goetz's mother, D behaved so well in his eyes that it was easy for him to decide to remove this obstacle. In his eyes, "the ease with which you are high contrasts with the nobility of her pretentious gestures: how proud I am of your performance before this noble lady", at which point Gautz called him "the most radiant creature on earth."
They want to share each other's lives, and they also begin to have hope for the future. "We can put almost everything together because we started with almost nothing. As long as I am willing to continue to experience everything that has always been, just a little more love, your eyes, your voice, your smell, your slender fingers, the way you dress, your body, your everything, the future will open its arms to us. ”
When Goetz was hesitant about marriage, and when he wasn't sure if he knew how to be faithful, D suggested that the best way to do that was to split up for a month and make a decision based on his true desires.
It was only then that Goetz understood, he wrote: "It was then that I understood that I did not need any deadline to think about; If I let you go like this, I'll regret it for the rest of my life. You are the first woman I have devoted myself to loving, and I can feel the resonance you have aroused in the depths of my heart; In short, it was my real first love. If I can't truly love you, maybe I can't love anyone again. I finally found these words that I had never been able to express; I want to tell you through these words that I hope we can be united forever. ”
In the days when D left, Goetz was extremely uneasy, and he described it this way, which also showed more of D's character.
You promised me that I would come back, but I wasn't very reassured. Your life would be easier without me. You don't need anyone's help to carve out a place for yourself in this world. You have a natural sense of majesty, a sense of contract and organization. You have a sense of humor, you are so comfortable no matter what the situation, and you are able to make others feel at ease. For the people you associate with, you will quickly gain their trust and be able to advise them. With intuition alone, you will be able to – surprisingly fast – grasp other people's problems and help them see themselves clearly. Every day I write to you to an old lady who lives in London, who has been widowed by the war, and whose life is to read a book a week. My letter is full of tenderness. I have realized that I need you and need you to help me find my path; I know I can only love you
Stay together
The two later lived together, and Goetz put it this way: "Once passion is discovered, this initial discovery makes the other person's voice, smell, complexion, movement, and way of being an ideal standard that reverberates in the depths of the heart." That's it:Love is about resonating with another person, body and soul, and only with him or her. We are already outside of philosophy. ”
Later, D's body was tormented by illness, but this did not affect the love between the two. On a vacation, "I secretly took a picture of your **, your back: on the big beach in La Jolla, your feet in the water. You are fifty-two years old. Beautiful. This is one of my favorite images of you. ”
When they were diagnosed with cancer and needed surgery, they went to the house designed by D together for a week. "I chiseled your name with a carving knife into a stone in the house. It's truly an amazing house. All the spaces are polygonal. Looking out of the bedroom window, you can see the treetops high up. None of us fell asleep on the first night. We listen to each other's breath. Then one of the nightingales sang, and the other made peace a little farther away. We didn't talk much. I was tumbling the floor all day, and every now and then I would look up and look at my bedroom window. You just stand there motionless, looking into the distance. I know you're wrestling with death, and I hope I'll be able to meet it fearlessly. In silence, you are so beautiful, so resolute, I can't imagine you being able to give up your life.
After undergoing surgery, the two began a new way of life, "no wealth, only life". "In the days of your coma, I decided to retire at the age of sixty. I began to count the times we had been separated. I find joy in cooking, I'm passionate about finding green foods that will help you regain your strength, and I'm keen to order homeopathic doctor-recommended authoritative preparations at Wagram Square. ”
At this time, there is only one thing that is most important to Goetz: and that is to be with D. "If you're gone, I can't imagine myself being able to keep writing. You are the most fundamental place, and everything else, no matter how important it seemed to me when you were there, lost its meaning and importance when you were gone. ”
In fact, in Goetz's very important book "The Traitor", this has already been expressed. "This chapter should mark a major turning point in my life. It should say how much I love you, no, it's better than that:It was with you that I discovered love, and this discovery finally made me find the desire to exist; It should also explain why the promise of the Hand of the Son will later be the driving force behind the conversion of my being.
Eternity
The story of the two is coming to an end. "At night, I sometimes see the shadow of a man: walking behind a hearse on an open road and in the desert. I am this man. It's you in the hearse. I don't want to go to your cremation, I don't want to receive a vase with your ashes. I heard Catherine Ferry singing, 'The world is empty, I don't want to live long,' and I woke up. I watch your breath and my hand gently brushes over your body. Neither of us wants to continue to live alone after the other person is gone. We often say to each other that in case there is an afterlife, we are still willing to spend it together
Holding the hand of the beloved, turning on the gas, at home on the outskirts of Paris, the two went to another world together, together forever.
In "The Traitor", there is also such a passage, "What he can be sure of is that he can't leave her." He hugged Kai tightly, and with some kind of relief, said, 'If you go, I'll follow you.' I can't stand to just watch you go', and after a while, he added, "Never", a conversation that took place between the two of them, Goetz used it in **, he recalled, when he himself said "I love you".
Write at the end
As the translator writes in the preface, "Suicide is not a kind of resistance and posture, but a kind of acceptance, companionship and active ending, and it is the final and responsible action of man as a "subject". On this premise, it can be beautiful and meaningful. It is believed that this kind of unconditional death can maintain a love without any conditions. ”
"The first time I fell deeply in love with someone, and at the same time received love from that person, I used to think that such stories were too banal, too personal, too ordinary: this is not a substance that can lead me to the universal sense." On the contrary, it is the failed, impossible love that is the category of noble literature. ”
But in the end, in the face of illness and pain, Goetz said, "I focus on your existence as I do on our beginning, and I want you to feel that." You give me your life, your everything; For the rest of the day, I hope to be able to give you everything I have. ”
I'm in love with you and you happen to love me, if this is a banal love story, I only wish everyone could meet such mediocrity. Valentine's Day Note: ** on the Internet.