on belief and love (aragon)

They told me that love is laughable, they told me that it’s simple, and explained how my heart works. So it seems. They told me not to believe in miracles, that if the table turns, somebody is nudging it with his foot. Finally, they showed me a man who falls in love on command, really in love, in love! can you beat that? in love; it’s the oldest story around.

But you don’t realize just how gullible I am, how ready at this point to believe anything: flowers could sprout up in her footsteps; she could turn night into broad daylight, and all the fantasies of the drunk or imagining mind, and it wouldn’t seem extraordinary. If they do not love, they are blind. I have seen the big white ghost with a broken chain emerge from the crypt; they, on the contrary, have not sensed the divinity of this woman. It strikes them as natural that she should be there, coming and going: their knowledge of her is abstract, it is formulated at one remove. The inexplicable does not strike them as obvious, does it?

- 145, The Feeling of Nature in the Buttes-Chaumont, Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon