Of all the literary tropes, if someone asked me to choose one, I would choose the one that defines love as a form of ongoing conversation. Javier Marías says it when he describes that “being with someone is largely about thinking out loud, that is, thinking about everything twice instead of once, once with the thought and once with the story, marriage is a narrative institution.” Also, in the cases that interest me the most, it is friendship: it is the whole decline of love. To love is to give extraordinary value to the word. When the whole world collapses, writes Juan Antonio González Iglesias, “something related to the birds and the lilies saves me. Then I have all the words. I dream of the words.” To love is to dream of words outside of oneself, to speak to someone instead of speaking to oneself, but also and above all to welcome the words of others: an exercise in mimetics. One of the most beautiful formulations I have found comes from Susan Sontag’s diary, but it is also a shocking, totalitarian, sometimes unfair maxim: “Ask, ask someone, and do it justifiably, to see what you saw. Exactly what you saw.”
We cannot feel or see the world through another’s eyes, but how often would we want to tear our own out, as if we were noticing the syncopated heart, which beats at the wrong time, so that we can rise to the occasion and respond to their request? When it happens effortlessly, seeing the same thing in the world as someone else has the substance of a miracle. The important thing is not what we call shared reality: being able to identify a flower, the sun, the clouds, the leaves, the colors. It is seeing something more in the things of the world than what the eye sees. See with the heart; in fact, with one’s memory: intuitively sharing an empire of signs.
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