Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.
Interpretation
In love, we often overlook our partner's flaws and selfishness as long as they desire us.
This quote highlights the unconditional nature of love, suggesting that when we are the object of a lover's affection, we tend to forgive their shortcomings and selfish behaviors. It points to the deep emotional connection that can allow individuals to overlook negative traits if the love is genuine, even hinting at the complexity of love and the challenges of translation between cultures, where profound feelings may not be easily conveyed.
In practice
During a Valentine's Day speech about the complexities of love and forgiveness.
When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.
Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.
You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.
Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me.
You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.3
I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you. You’re just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please?
His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.
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