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Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita ...

Just like you, they are desperate and aching for you as well. The San Clemente Syndrome. Today's basilica is built on the side of what once was a refuge for persecuted Christians. The home of Roman Consul Titus Flavious Clemens, it was burnt down during Emperor Nero's reign. Next to its charred remains, the Romans built an underground pagan temple dedicated to Mithras, over whose temple the early christians built another church dedicated to Pope Clement, on top of another church that burnt down, and on the site of which stands today's Basilica. Like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like every single one of us, the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations. There is no rock bottom, there is no first anything, no last anything, just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers.

If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, dont snuff it out, dont be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner that we'd want to be forgetten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste! Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us cant help but live as though we've got two lives, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to be near it. Right now there's sorrow. I dont envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.

He was more me than I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself. In the weeks we'd been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth, and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.

- Call Me By Your Name - André Aciman

I honestly dont know the answer, Your Grace. For Raphael, the creating of a work of art is a bright spring day in the Campagna; for me, it is a transmontana howling down the valley from the mountaintops. I work from early morning to dark, then by candlelight or oil lamp. Art for me is a torment, griveous when it goes bad, ecstatic when it goes well; but always it possesses me. When I have finished with a day of work I am a husk. Everything that was inside of me is now inside the marble or the fresco. That is why I have nothing to give elsewhere.

-The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone

He knows about Saudade, a Portuguese condition that resists translation, composed of an unspecified yearning; a sense of displacement and solitariness, a longing for the familiar, with a knowledge of the immensity of distance and the fragility of human bonds. It is an ecstacy of nostalgia, an echo of waves beating on a distant shore. He knows what it is but he can never share it.

-Distant Music, Lee Langley