AMANTER

Picture a man sitting on a cliff, looking at the sea.

He is alone, and he knows why. He has been in love before and lost it. He has waited for it to come back and it has not. At some point in the last few years, he stopped being certain it would ever return, and the stopping was not a relief. It was just another thing he now knew about himself. The sea in front of him does not care. It goes on being the sea. He goes on being someone who once loved someone.

This image does not belong to any century. It could be a painting from the 1840s. It could be a photo on a phone from last week. But the words underneath it, if you want them, were written two thousand years ago in Rome by a poet named Catullus.

He wrote this:

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why do I do it, perhaps you ask. I don't know. But I feel it happening, and it tortures me.

Eight words in Latin. Two lines. Catullus was writing about a woman — almost certainly a real one, called Lesbia in the poems — who he loved and who did not love him back in any way that would hold. He did not try to philosophize his way out of it. He did not reach for consolation. He reached for the thing everyone who has ever loved recognizes: the split inside the feeling itself. The same person, the same moment, both wanted and resented. The torture is not that love is absent. The torture is that it is present in a shape that will not stay.

Love is the shortest eternal thing. We wait for it our whole lives, and when it comes it is already leaving, and we recognize it mostly by the shape of its absence.

Love is the shortest eternal thing. We wait for it our whole lives, and when it comes it is already leaving, and we recognize it mostly by the shape of its absence.

Sixteen hundred years later, a French comedian named Molière wrote the sentence that states the whole problem in one line. De toutes les choses éternelles, l'amour est la plus courte. Of all eternal things, love is the shortest. He put it in the mouth of a minor character in Le Dépit amoureux — not as a theory. As an observation. A man who had been around long enough to notice.

This is what AMANTER is about. Not love the euphoria. Not love the conquest. Not the version sold in songs written by people still young enough to believe it arrives on schedule. Love the short eternity — the thing that goes on being the most important thing for decades, and yet when it is happening lasts about as long as a good afternoon, and when it is gone takes years to stop hurting. Anyone who has lived a full human life knows the ratio. We pretend otherwise because the honesty is hard to carry.

The man on the cliff is not sad in the way we use the word sad. He is informed. He has seen the shape. He is not in love now, and he remembers being in love, and he knows that the distance between those two states is the majority of a human life. He watches the sea. The waiting goes on. The waiting is almost the whole thing.

Amanter. Lovingly. In Latin it is an adverb — not a noun, not an action, a way of being. As if Catullus and Molière and the man on the cliff all agreed on one thing: even if love will not stay, there is a way to hold the waiting. Not happily. Not bitterly. Lovingly. Open, still, and undefended.

AMANTER is the sound of someone deciding to keep feeling it anyway.

— Catullus, c. 84–54 BC; with Molière, 1622–1673 AD