Two from G.

I cannot continue this account of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6 May 1898. From this point on, everything I write will either converge upon a final full stop or else disperse so wildly that it will become incoherent. Yet there was no such convergence and no incoherence. To stop here, despite all that I leave unsaid, is to admit more of the truth than will be possible if I bring the account to a conclusion. The writer's desire to finish is fatal to the truth. The End unifies. Unity must be established in another way.


*****

The state of being in love was usually short-lived -- except in the unhappy cases of unrequited love. Far shorter lived than the nineteenth century romantic emphasis on the condition would lead us to believe. Sexual passion may have varied little throughout recorded history. But the account one renders to oneself about being in love is always informed and modified by the specific culture and social relations of the time.


G., John Berger
1972