Excerpts from Essays in Love

For a moment, I fantasized I might transform myself into a carton of yogurt so as to undergo the same process of being gently and thoughtfully accommodated by her into a shopping bag between a tin of tuna and a bottle of olive oil. ~Alain de Button

Some excerpts and quotes from Ellipsis, the last chapter of Essays in Love, by Alain de Button:

"There is an Arabic saying that the soul travels at the pace of a camel. While we are forced ahead by the relentless dynamic of the timetabled present, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory. If every love affair adds a certain weight to the camel's load, then we can expect the soul to slow according to the significance of love's burden..."

"The present held nothing for me, the past had become the only inhabitable tense."

"...Yet guilt accompanied this forgetting. It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting was a reminder of death, of loss, of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear."

"The camel became lighter and lighter as it walked through time, it kept shaking memories and photos off its back, scattering them over the desert floor and letting the wind bury them in the sand, and gradually the camel became so light that it could trot and even gallop in its own crious way - until one day, in a small oasis that called itself the present, the exhausted creature finally caught up with the rest of me."