Bouguereau knows about Love and our Psyche.

Everything Bouguereau has ever painted is amazing.

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Last night I watched the rest of Love In the Time of Cholera, and I loved it so much. The book was fantastic, one of my all-time favorite literary excerpts is from that novel:

"At midnight he put on his Sunday suit and went to stand alone under Fermina Daza's balcony to play the love waltz he had composed for her, which was known only to the two of them and which for three years had been the emblem of their frustrated complicity. He played, murmuring the words, his violin bathed in tears, with an inspiration so intense that with the first measures the dogs on the street and then the dogs all over the city began to howl, but then, little by little, they were quieted by the spell of the music, and the waltz ended in supernatural silence. The balcony did not open, and no one appeared on the street, not even the night watchman, who almost always came running with his oil lamp in an effort to profit in some small way from serenades. The act was an exorcism of relief for Florentino Ariza, for when he put his violin back into its case and walked down the dead streets without looking back, he no longer felt that he was leaving the next morning but that he had gone away many years before with the irrevocable deterination never to return."


Even though I loved this story, I feel like watching the film made me more sympathetic to the complexity of Florentino and Fermina. I think there were a lot of ways the film could have been improved, but not in terms of character development. I now have a better understanding of how Florentino Ariza could sleep with hundreds of women, be obsessed with Love--giving it, receiving it-- and yet remain wholly devoted to and be madly in ["actual"] love with Fermina Daza for over fifty years, even though she remarried [out of "conveinence", though she cared about whats-his-face and had kids with him, but she questioned that other kind of love and knew the whole time that there was a difference between that love and her love for Florentino Ariza, and she resigned to never know that original love again]. When I first read the book, I had some difficulty understanding that kind of duality found in both of them--it just seemed like a contradiction to me. But now I think I get it.

In the last few months, there have been two novels and the films based on them--Love In the Time of Cholera and The Unbearable Lightness of Being--which have given me some profound insight into the flexibility of love and the durability of our hearts. I need to work less, and read more! In the last year, I've been on the longest reading hiatius of my life. I'm trippin'.