INTRODUCTION by Xavier Perez-Pons
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 the owner let me have for free since it came from the same place as the other two. These books, though, did not seem to have any connection with the other ones. These were immaculate, bound in blue shades of Moroccan leather, without a single note written on the margins, and they were mostly novels of different genres. So, I declined the offer, which later I regretted, for reasons that soon I will make clear. When I tried to go back for them, however, it was too late: the blue books were in the hands of an interior decorator. It pains me to picture them turned into an atrezzo, into furniture accessories.
For several weeks, I left the books in their boxes, forgotten in a room, as my job prevented me from going through them. When I finally found the time to exhume them, I found, scattered among several volumes, a manuscript in the form of correspondence: ten long letters, written in tight, minuscule handwriting on double-sided paper (the same handwriting responsible for the notes in the book margins). The last of these letters dated from just three months before my casual visit to the old man's bookshop, so the author must have written it right before he passed away. (He'd still have time, however, for a mysterious trip abroad. But we'll talk more about that later on.) Regarding his identity, my inquiries proved fruitless (the signature at the end of each letter was unreadable). The only biographical information we have, then, is what the author tells us throughout the manuscript: not much beyond his marital status as a widower, and his wife's, who is the recipient and leitmotif of the letters, first name: Blanca. The letter's private nature, how personal they were, had kept me from publishing them. Then I noticed a detail in the manuscript to which I had not given much thought: the crossed-out notes on the margins, which were evidently made at some later time, as they didn't come from the same fountain pen but from a thick marker. These cross-outs, which first appear on the second letter, were made in a hurry, as if its terminally ill author, guessing the future of his manuscript, had felt the need to cross out the notes he had made while writing the letters. In any case, the rushed approach to the blackouts allowed me to glean fragments of paragraphs and loose words from every note, which I thought appropriate to include in here, inserting them at approximately the same point they appear in the manuscript.
I have to say in advance that, from the tenor of three of the enigmatic allusions in the letters, it seems that all the notes have some connection with the aforementioned blue books. It also suggests something shocking, which I do not even dare to judge; I will let the reader do that. It implies that, through the blue books, the author believes he is receiving messages from his late wife. Not posthumous messages, but actual communications, as if she were still alive. In those books, that he frequently read, he finds – or believes he finds – luminous signs, faint phosphorescences that stand out to him and highlight a paragraph or a sentence, to which he confers a personal meaning and attributes to his dead wife. We can assume these messages usually come to him during a break in his writing (which appears to have been a nocturnal activity), and that he jots them down on the margins, maybe with the intention of coming back to them later.
Anyway, I have gone on for too long about this minor subject of the crossed-out notes. The thing is, instead of doing what he did, instead of taking the time to censure the annotations haphazardly, he could have thrown the whole manuscript away. He did not, though, and that convinces me he would not oppose its posthumous publication. Perhaps, and this is my primary motivation for publishing them, he thought these letters would offer a glimmer of hope to people in a similar situation as his. Maybe even spare some reader the same tortuous search for answers he undertook. Be it as it may, it is my duty to warn you that the content of these letters is as controversial as its circumstances. The author does not stop at scouring through ancient wisdom for the concept of twin souls: he uses it as a basis to draft – with a more or less steady hand, depending on which part – a metaphysical structure. Such structure, naturally (or other people would have already figured it out), though it finds support in the opinions of ancient sages (though not all of them), was not framed by them as such. Therefore, it is inappropriate to credit them as the author does.
That said, I have to add that nothing is invented. Moreover, while the author does generalise, he makes it work, connecting everything in his way and putting forward his own conclusions. With this, he draws a personal synthesis of ancient wisdom. It would be understandable for us to label this synthesis – along with the supernatural phenomenology I just mentioned – as something belonging to the fantasy genre. We should not, then, place too much faith on the results of his painstaking investigation work being the elusive Truth so eagerly sought by wise men across time and space. We could imagine the author – in one of those metaphorical exercises he seemed to enjoy – diving into the sea of ancient knowledge, resurfacing with a fist full of pearls, and then proceeding to thread them on the silk string of ancient belief in twin souls. The ancient sages are responsible for the beads, but the necklace is the author's work.
The pearls are, nonetheless, genuine. If we take for example what, from the modern perspective, appears to be the most unacceptable item in his structure: the devaluation of sensual love, which is, to a large extent, one of the pearls he salvages from ancient wisdom; all he does is thread it into the necklace, next to the other pearls. Beyond his excessive tendency to generalise, though, he also tends to oversimplify, perhaps with the intention of making more accessible, both to himself and to his wife, those “pearls”, those old notions that, given the opportunity, he will not hesitate in clarifying as it suits him. All this leads to a subjective interpretation of the old wisdom: an analysis by a man in love.
In his defence, however, we can quote one of the books he handled (The Burnt Book, by Marc-Alain Ouaknin; an essay on the Talmud, the central text of Judaism). It goes like this: “Is it really necessary to go into a debate on interpretation? Did the authors referred to really have the intentions we ascribe to them? Who can tell? The only criterion for judging an interpretation is its richness, its fruitfulness. Anything that gives matter of thought honours the person who proffers it.” This quote conveys what appears to be one of the main ideas in the Talmud, a book with origins in oral tradition; the idea that the old wisdom is not something settled, static; it is not a snapshot of the past, like a still life, but something alive and ever evolving. Old wisdom grows and blooms with each new interpretation, including –why not?- the one proposed by the author of these letters.
Besides, we never know, the world is so beautiful and mysterious that it could very well have hidden its structure from the wisest of sages, only to reveal it to a dilatant. In any case, if you are solely interested in ancient accounts of twin souls, the first two letters will be enough to satisfy your curiosity. However, if you are tempted to dive deep into the metaphysics of love, then do not be intimidated by the length of the text and do not give up reading until the very end – where a surprise awaits you.
Finally, I numbered the letters, gave them titles and divided them into sections for their publication. I also attached bibliographic references corresponding to the abounding quotes, all of them taken from the books now in my possession, from which I also took ten illustrations, and ten epigraphs to head them. I felt I should split the collection into two large sections, so that is what I did. Lastly, I titled it.
LOVE LETTERS FROM A WIDOWER:
THE MYSTERY OF SOUL MATES IN LIGHT OF ANCIENT WISDOM
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