When one is in love, besotted, with another, then one sees meanings everywhere and even the slightest happenance can move one to joy or despair. In this classic book Goethe describes, with almost painful honestly, how every man who has ever lived has felt when in the throes of love. There is a scene where young Werther, who is in love with Lotte, is at the carriage of her home to wave goodbye after a party. There are others there too, all waving goodbye, and young Werther is trying to catch lotte's eyes but:
"but ah, her eyes they gazed from one to another! But not at me! Me! Me! I was the only one who saw nothing there but her, and she did not look my way! My heart bade her a thousand adieus! But she did not see me! My carriage drove off and my eyes filled with tears for she had not looked at me! I looked out of the carriage and saw her bonnet and she turned to look back, ah! at me! But I am left with uncertainty. Did she look back at me or not! Was it me? Oh, what a child I am! How can one be so hungry for a look!"
I love the way Goethe describes the torments of being in love. Have we not all felt like this at some point in our lives? If not a look then perhaps a text message or email or an action or some other thing. We look for deeper meanings in the smallest things, in scraps and as a result we create a world of imagined things, of imagined lives, of imagined feelings. A whole world dwelling inside our heads constructed on the most flimsiest of foundations.
So this is what it is like to be human!
