"...love as the Ancients understood it..."

“[...] And then she fell in love. She fell in love silently, obstinately – perhaps helplessly. It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful spell; it was love as the Ancients understood it: an irresistible and fateful impulse – a possession! Yes, it was in her to become haunted and possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a pagan worshipper of form under a joyous sky - and to be awakened at last from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from that enchantment, from that transport, by a fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a brute...”

Joseph Conrad, “Amy Foster”

From the 1997 film, based on the story,  Swept from the sea, starring Rachel Weisz and Vincent Pérez.

On whose threshold we stand humble acolytes...

The paragraph that I leave you here brought to my mind a very vivid memory from my childhood, although a bit different from the text above. When I was little, every time my family visited my father's home town – Stara Zagora, the two of us with my brother had a very important ritual. We just had to visit one of the big book-stores in the city called Pingvinite (The Penguins). I was so indescribably happy to smell the aroma of new books, to choose The One that I would bring home with me... I believe I still have this obsession with book-stores.

© 2015, Cristiana Bobeva

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Every two weeks or so, my mother takes me to the library to provide for my next fortnight's reading. Every time, I anticipate the event as if it were a trip into Sesame itself. The library is located in a narrow, old street, in an ancient building, which one enters through a heavy wooden door. The interior is Plato's cave, Egyptian temple, the space of mystery and magic, on whose threshold I stand a humble acolyte. It is yellowly lit, smoky with dust and respectful whispers, and behind the counters, which stop the customers from entering farther, it reveals deep, ceiling-tall rows if shelves. When your turn comes, one of the guardians of the mysteries – most of them bespectacled women in black, satiny versions of a nurse's uniform – approaches for a consultation. My mother mentions some author or title she's interested in. And as for me – what might I want to read next? And adventure story? A boarding school novel? Something historical? The very thought of these possibilities makes the next two weeks a terrain of potential pleasure. The guardian then quietly vanishes into the cavernous interior, to emerge with a sack of musty, yellow-paged volumes. I open them; I sniff their aged smell; I read a few words; some of them have illustrations at which I look greedily; then I have to choose from the riches of Araby.

Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation