AT FIRST SIGHT
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
I have been thinking about Tomas for many years, but not until I saw him in the light of a new perception did I see him clearly. I saw him standing at the window of his flat and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to do.
He had first met Tereza about three weeks earlier in a small Czech town. They had spent scarcely an hour together. She had accompanied him to the station and waited with him until he boarded the train. Ten days later she paid him a visit. They made love the day she arrived. That night she came down with a fever, and stayed a whole week in his flat with the flu.
He had come to feel an inexplicable love for this all but complete stranger; she seemed a child to him, a child someone had laid in a bulrush basket daubed with pitch, and sent downstream for Tomas to fetch at the riverbank of his bed.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman
I have always taken great pride in managing my life alone. I’m a sole survivor - I’m Eleanor Oliphant. I don’t need anyone else - there’s no big hole in my life, no missing part of my own particular puzzle. I am a self-contained entity. That’s what I’ve always told myself, at any rate. But last night, I’d found the love of my life. When I saw him walk on stage, I just knew.
G AY LOVE
Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
But this time when I touched him something happened in him and in me which made this touch different from any touch either of us had ever known. And he did not resist, as he usually did, but lay where I had pulled him, against my chest. And I realized that my heart was beating in an awful way and that Joey was trembling against me and the light in the room was very bright and hot. I started to move and to make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.
I was very frightened; I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes. To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it.
I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.
Philippe Besson Lie With Me 2017
Love, it’s mouths that seek, lips that bite, drawing a little blood. His stubble irritates my chin, his hands grab my jaw so that I can’t escape.
It’s the coarseness of his hair where I slide my fingers, the tautness of his neck. My arms close around him, encircle him to be as close as possible, so that there is no space between us.
It’s torsos that join together and then withdraw in a hurry to remove clothing, the Nordic sweater, the T-shirt, so that finally it’s skin next to skin. His torso is muscular and hairless, with nipples that are flat and dark. My chest is skinny, not yet deformed as it will be four years later by the blows of an emergency room doctor.
It’s skin that is frantically caressed. My fingers find a constellation of moles, just as I guessed, on his back.
It’s jeans that we unbutton. I discover his sex, veiny, white, sumptuous. I am enthralled by his sex. It will take many years and many lovers before I ever return to this sense of amazement.
Love, it’s taking each other in the mouth, maintaining a certain comportment despite the frenzy. It’s exercising restraint not to come, the excitement is so powerful. It’s abandonment, that crazy trust in the other.
Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney
Remember the first time we kissed? he said. At the party. And I said I didn’t think the utility room was a good place to be kissing and we left. You know I went up to my room and waited for you, right? I mean for hours. And at first I really thought you would come. It was probably the most wretched I ever felt in my life, this kind of ecstatic wretchedness that in a way I was practically enjoying. Because even if you did come upstairs, what then? The house was full of people, it’s not like anything was going to happen. But every time I thought of going back down again I would imagine hearing you on the stairs, and I couldn’t leave, I mean I physically couldn’t. Anyway, how I felt then, knowing that you were close by and feeling completely paralyzed by it, this phone call was similar. If I told you where my car was right now, I don’t think I’d be able to leave, I think I would have to stay here just in case you changed your mind about everything. You know, I still have that impulse to be available to you. You’ll notice I didn’t buy anything in the supermarket.
I closed my eyes. Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytic position.
Come and get me, I said.
Swann’s Way
Marcel Proust
He would make Odette play him the phrase again, ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, while she played, she must never cease to kiss him. Every kiss provokes another. Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life.
The Spanish Dancer
Rainer Maria Rilke
As a lit match first flickers in the hands
Before it flames, and darts out from all sides Bright, twitching tongues, so, ringed by growing bands
Of spectators—she, quivering, glowing stands Poised tensely for the dance—then forward glides
And suddenly becomes a flaming torch.
Her bright hair flames, her burning glances scorch, And with a daring art at her command
Her whole robe blazes like a fire-brand
From which is stretched each naked arm, awake, Gleaming and rattling like a frightened snake.
And then, as though the fire fainter grows, She gathers up the flame—again it glows,
As with proud gesture and imperious air
She flings it to the earth; and it lies there
Furiously flickering and crackling still— Then haughtily victorious, but with sweet Swift smile of greeting, she puts forth her will And stamps the flames out with her small firm feet.
Oscar Wilde
Salomé 1893
It is thy mouth that I desire, Jokanaan. Thy mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory. It is like a pomegranate cut with a knife of ivory. The pomegranate-flowers that blossom in the gardens of Tyre, and are redder than roses, are not so red. The red blasts of trumpets that herald the approach of kings, and make afraid the enemy, are not so red. Thy mouth is redder than the feet of those who tread the wine in the wine-press. Thy mouth is redder than the feet of the doves who haunt the temples and are fed by the priests. It is redder than the feet of him who cometh from a forest where he hath slain a lion, and seen gilded tigers. Thy mouth is like a branch of coral that fishers have found in the twilight of the sea, the coral that they keep for the kings!... It is like the vermilion that the Moabites find in the mines of Moab, the vermilion that the kings take from them. It is like the bow of the King of the Persians, that is painted with vermilion, and is tipped with coral. There is nothing in the world so red as thy mouth....
Let me kiss thy mouth.
TANGO
Widower's Tango
Pablo Neruda
1933 & 1935
Oh Maligna, by now you will have found the letter, by now you will have cried with rage and you will have insulted the memory of my mother calling her a rotten bitch and a mother of dogs, by now you will have drunk alone, all by yourself, your afternoon tea with your eyes on my old shoes which are empty forever, and by now you will not be able to recall my illness, my dreams at night, my meals without cursing me out loud as though I were still there complaining of the tropics, of the coolies corringhis, of the poisonous fevers which did me such harm, and of the horrendous English whom I still hate.
Maligna, the truth of it, how vast the night is, how lonely the earth!
I have gone back again to single bedrooms, to cold lunches in restaurants, and I drop my pants and my shirts on the floor as I used to, there are no hangers in my room, and nobody’s pictures are on the walls.
How much of the shadow that is in my soul I would give to have you back, the names of the months sound to me like threats and the word winter is like the sound of lugubrious drum.
Later on you will find buried near the coconut tree the knife which I hid there for fear you would kill me, and now suddenly I would be glad to smell its kitchen steel used to the weight of your hand, the shine of your foot: under the dampness of the ground, among the deaf roots. In all the languages of men only the poor will know your name, and the dense earth does not understand your name made of impenetrable divine substances.
Thus it hurts me to think of the clear day of your legs in repose like waters of the sun made to stay in place, and the swallow that lives in your eyes sleeping and flying, and the mad dog that you harbour in your heart, and thus also I see the dead who are between us and will be from now on, and I breathe ash and utter ruin in the air itself, I would give this giant sea-wind for your sudden breath and the vast solitary space that will be around me forever.
I would give this wind off the giant sea for your hoarse breathing
heard in the long nights unmixed with oblivion, becoming part of the atmosphere as the whip becomes part of the horse’s skin. And to hear you make water, in the darkness, at the bottom of the house, as though you were pouring a slow, tremulous, silvery, obstinate honey, how many times over would I yield up this choir of shadows which I possess, and the clash of useless swords which is audible in my soul, and the dove of blood, alone on my forehead, calling to things which have vanished, to beings who have vanished, to substances incomprehensibly inseparable and lost.
Sanny Winters (born 1975) and her partner form the graphic design duo Oeyen & Winters.
As a visual artist, she has previously published the books A City, Belgium Xtra Bold , Gent Xtra Bold and Mirror. Her love of letters and of love itself come together in this new book.
For a selection of the most beautiful excerpts from world literature, Sanny called on her close friend Silvie Moors. Silvie Moors (born 1975) studied Germanic language and literature. She loves reading and people, and places where the two come together. She is a reading promoter, literary moderator and 'book doctor'.
Book design / Tim Oeyen and Sanny Winters
© Lannoo Publishers, Tielt, Belgium, 2025 D/2025/45/558 - THEMA: AFF, AKL, AKD
ISBN: 978-90-599-6039-8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training and similar technologies.