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INTRODUCTION by Xavier Perez-Pons

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ANNOUNCEMENT AND DISCLAIMER On a spring afternoon in the year two thousand, I happened to wander into a bookshop in the old Barri Gòtic in Barcelona. The owner was busy taking books from two large wooden boxes. I was curious, so I asked him if I could have a look. The books were in Catalan, Spanish, French, and English, some of them illustrated, most of them filled with underlinings and pencil notes on the margin; there were also a couple in Portuguese and some other in Italian. They were of all sorts of literary genres, although I could spot a common subject. I asked the owner where he had gotten these boxes. They had belonged to a man that had recently died; that is all he knew. He had bought them at an auction, along with other private libraries and lots from all over the place. I asked him to give me a price, and I took the whole lot home. Actually, that is not true. There was more to the lot than those two boxes. There was a third one. A third box, which...
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GERMAN ROMANTICS

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(Quoted from the book:)  A lone Romantic poet, Hölderlin had a difficult life: he was hounded by financial problems, misunderstood by his contemporaries, and, towards the middle of his life, he suffered from a mental illness that prevented him from living a normal life. But all these tribulations were eclipsed by the joy he felt when he met Susette Gontard, the companion soul he had been seeing in dreams ever since he was a child, and with whom he would be united by a love he would describe as “sacred and eternal”.   Recognition was instantaneous and reciprocal (“Is it you, is it really you?!”). Their encounter was a typical case of synchronicity. The same circumstances of their meeting were predicted, with astonishing precision, in the first drafts of his novel Hyperion . Hölderlin would see his female protagonist embodied in this woman, who was of a sensitivity so close to his, as we can read in the beautiful letters that she wrote him after their forced separation. Their ...
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ENGLISH ROMANTICS

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(Quoted from the book:) The English Romantic William Blake, painter, engraver and mystic poet, also imagined the twin souls’ final reunion in God. Blake has many points in common with that other famous mystic, Swedenborg, by whom he was influenced. Their most remarkable common trait is their visionary gift, although, in this aspect, Blake was more precocious than our friend Swedenborg, since his visions seem to date back to his early childhood (he saw some angels perched on a tree while he was strolling around London with his father, who severely admonished him for telling lies!). These visions accompanied him throughout his entire life. They greatly inspired his work, Blanca, as the following anecdote, told by one of his disciples, will attest: this disciple was going through a time of creative crisis and, one day, visiting Blake’s house, he started to complain about it. Blake patiently listened to him, and then he turned to his wife Katherine and said, “The same thing happens to us...
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LOVE FROM AFAR

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“Amor de lonh” (Love from afar) is the name by which the troubadour of the 12th century Jaufre Rudel, Prince of Blaye, named his beloved. I just quote from LOVE LETTERS FROM A WIDOWER: THE MYSTERY OF SOUL MATES IN LIGHT OF ANCIENT WISDOM: “Rudel is being killed by nostalgia for a woman he has never seen. But he ends up putting a face to this woman: she is the Countess of Tripoli, whom he recognises as his twin soul on account of the stories he hears from trav ellers returning from the Holy Land (Tripoli was one of the areas conquered by the crusaders). He even becomes a crusader himself just so he can go see her. However, during the trip, he falls ill and arrives at Tripoli on the verge of death. When the Countess learns of his presence, she rushes to be at his side, and so he dies in her arms, thanking God for allowing him to see her” https://www.amazon.com/Love-letters-widower-mystery-ancient-ebook/dp/B07CMG3HY3
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THE SCENARIO

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This engraving seems to evoke the scenario in which the Letters were written. Its author, momentarily leaving his writing work, searches among the books of the blue library for any sign of his deceased wife. (Engraving by Frans Masereel, 1920) https://www.amazon.com/Love-letters-widower-mystery-ancient-ebook/dp/B07CMG3HY3/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1546874346&sr=1-1&keywords=Love+letters+from+a+widower
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LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

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Quoted from the book: (Love at first sight) Out of all the examples I know, the loveliest one, in my opinion, was imagined by the English writer D.H. Lawrence in his novel-saga The Rainbow... Tom Brangwen was returning from Nottingham, one day, to his home in Cossethay with the cart packed with sacks of seed. He was walking alongside the horse when he saw a woman on the road, coming his way... "She had heard the cart, and looked up. Her face was pale and clear, she had thick dark eyebrows and a wi de mouth, curiously held. He saw her face clearly, as if by a light in the air. He saw her face so distinctly, that he ceased to coil on himself, and was suspended. 'That's her', he said involuntarily.../.... The feeling that they had exchanged recognition possessed him like a madness, like a torment. How could he be sure, what confirmation had he? The doubt was like a sense of infinite space, a nothingness, annihilating. He kept within his breast the will to s...
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THE WOMAN/MAN OF HIS/HER DREAMS

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(Quoted from the book:) "I was telling you that perfume, or that concavity in bed, is like the 'ghost' of an absent person. Well, Jung calls this ghost of a woman present in the soul of every man 'anima'; 'animus' is the ghost of a man present in every woman. In light of the theory of the twin souls, the anima or the animus would be the reminiscence, the remains left in the soul by the spouse from the Origin as a result of its departure. This 'ghost' can appear in our dreams,   Blanca; the expression 'the woman –or the man- of my dreams' would be an allusion to it. Because dreams, my dear (as you may very well know; it has not been long since you slipped into one of mine), are not necessarily the usual banal and inconsequential dreams that serve as an outlet for the worries of waking life. When one pays close attention, dreams can become windows with a view to the backyard of reality, of hidden reality… In his medical practice as a psycholog...
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