La Vita Nuova Book

It doesn't much matter what the reality is when you are holding a dialogue in your mind with another part of your mind that has its roots in something that was in fact once real and refuses to depart. In the final analysis one experiences only oneself, and our life is no dream but it ought to become one and perhaps will. A part of us functions in the phantasmagoria which we call the everyday world, but another part holds on to memories and ideals which it instinctively knows are infinitely more enduring than these shadows that pass away from moment to moment. If it's true that physically we are what we eat, it is even truer that spiritually we are what we once longed for and continue to long for. Yearnings from maybe the distant past that never left us, that continue to be the guiding force in our lives, though we don't know why, and that refract all of our thoughts down the years. Unresolved issues that have embedded themselves into our psyches like black holes into the fabric of the universe, altering the courses of stars, sucking them in. Dante embodies this sentiment. His brief glimpse of the lovely young Beatrice in a street one day in mediaeval Florence set his mind alight and never left him even in old age. It wasn't rational, but then what is? Nothing is rational. But it was right. It was absolutely good, and right. It was something that God approved of. Dante lost Beatrice, never even had her, but his memory of her remained the single most important influence on his life and art, and I believe that these glimpses of eternity are the only real blessings we have any right to hope for. They are something solid, worthwhile, good, and pure and abiding, like anchors, like rocks protruding through quicksand or through an avalanche. I could go on forever, but I'm starting to bore myself... We are what we yearn for. Isolating that signal is our main task in life, I think. For some it is faint or non-existent, whilst for others like Dante it is deafening