About the book
The idea that runs through the whole book is old and simple: in the beginning there was the One, and the One split in two. Since then, everything that is separate longs for what it has lost. In this light, the love between two people is more than a happy accident. It is a memory. "Love is not learned. It is only remembered."
The road of the book follows this memory step by step. It begins with the gaze that makes the other real, passes through meeting, longing, body, word and wound, pauses at the shadows of jealousy, at the time of those in love and at those who are no longer here. Then it opens toward a love that asks nothing in return and ends where it began: at the One.
It is not a book of advice and not a treatise. Each aphorism stands alone, like a candle lit in a dark room. Together, they light a road.
The book speaks in several spiritual languages, convinced that the maps are many and the territory is one.
Hermeticism, the tradition attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, offers the basic principle: "as above, so below". What happens between two people mirrors, on a small scale, what happens in the cosmos.
Tantra, from India, speaks of Shiva and Shakti, consciousness and energy, two polarities whose reunion is love itself. In the book's reading, tantra is not a collection of techniques but the reminder that the body is a temple and that touch can be prayer.
Bhakti, the path of devotion in the Indian tradition, brings two precious words: viraha, the longing for the Divine, sometimes held to be deeper than the meeting itself, and prema, pure love, without expectation.
Christian mysticism comes with the Song of Songs, with the idea that love is stronger than death, and with that "herida deliciosa", the sweet wound the Spanish mystics spoke of.
Plato, in the Symposium, preserves the myth of Aristophanes: people were once whole, they were cut in two, and ever since they have been searching for each other. And the Romanian dor, the word the book calls "the Romanian name for divine absence", gathers all these searches into a single syllable.
The book has a prologue, twelve chapters and an epilogue: 341 aphorisms in all. Each chapter opens with a motto and follows a single theme, and the order of the chapters forms an arc, from the original separation to the finding again.
The aphorisms can be read in order, as a road, or opened at random, one a day. Both readings are fitting. The prologue says it plainly: "The aphorism is the form of language closest to silence."
The book names its own reader, in the epilogue: "This book is not for those who love. They do not need it. It is for those who have not yet dared, or for those who have forgotten."
It is, then, for anyone who has felt at least once that love is more than a feeling and has wanted to understand where this suspicion comes from. It asks for no knowledge of philosophy or religion. It asks only for the willingness to read slowly.
If you want to begin, open the prologue and read a single aphorism. Let it stay with you for a day. The rest of the book is waiting.
Who it is for
The book names its own reader, in the epilogue: "This book is not for those who love. They do not need it. It is for those who have not yet dared, or for those who have forgotten."