It is later in the afternoon at one of the tables downstairs, and Frank is musing on romance, both on the Camino and off. He hasn’t yet had the chance to introduce me to Maude, but we can hear her laughing and talking outside. “Love is not rational. It is not rational to be loyal to one person if I could be with other beautiful women, if there are other people I could love as well. Romantics will say they don’t care, that they choose to love just one, but this just isn’t logical.”
He stops and gazes out at Maude. “So the first thing you must do is admit that you are foolish.”
“Are you saying that loving one person for a whole lifetime is impossible?”
“Not at all. It is just irrational. If you want to love someone your whole life, you cannot expect to do that with your head. You have to go beyond what is rational.”
The Budapest is much less of a romantic. A French man with darkly tanned skin and a body devoid of excess fat, he began walking in Budapest because, as he claims proudly, it was the farthest point east. He doesn’t go by his name, Jean-François, but prefers to be known as ‘the Budapest’.
‘The problem is so many people believe that finding a companion will erase their solitude,’ he says. ‘It never will. And it is not the fault of the companion, nor of the relationship. Solitude will always be there. We must celebrate and value it.’ He reads me a passage from a book called ‘L’Éloignement du monde’ – Distancing from the world: ‘Those who know how to love us accompany us to the doorstep of our solitude and remain there without going one more step. Those who pretend to go farther in our company remain, in fact, much farther behind.’
‘Solitude is a fundamental human state,’ he continues. ‘Some people become disappointed in love when they realize it does not negate this. But we need to value our aloneness as much as we do our togetherness.’
No comments:
Post a Comment