LOVE LETTERS FROM A WIDOWER: THE MYSTERY OF SOUL MATES IN LIGHT OF ANCIENT WISDOM

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...

(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 ...

(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...