[I ought to have published this entry almost three months ago, but I didn't find time nor motivation to finish it properly and I a not sure I ever will. But time passes and I am far beyond schedule, so I hope that nobody will bother if I'll delete this entry in the future replacing it with a more complete one. I would like to dedicate it to my friends Paola and Federico Fedrizzi and Delia and Razvan Gurau who got married in July.]
In the interview that the German actress Cosma Shiva Hagen (IMDB) gave to the DB Mobil magazine I found some words worth quotation:
Romeo und Julia sind ja zwei Kinder, die sich ineinander verlieben und sich da voll reinhängen. Was im Erwachsenenalter oft verschwindet, weil man nicht mehr an die Liebe glaubt, sie viel theoretischer sieht.¹
I couldn’t agree more. The long road that brings us from childhood through puberty to the adult life is filled with disenchantment, the death of the more naïve ideals and the painful aknoledgement of the complexity of the world. First we learn that Santa Claus is just one of our relatives with a funny beard and costume; then it is the turn of the other illusions of Foscolo:
The ideals of justice, democracy, glory, beauty, the importance of life and somebody could say God, fall from their pedestals into the category of chimeras or just approximations of the real life.
Justice isn’t the same for everyone and all the attorneys know it: their skills can make a cause just or unjust. Democracy easily turns into demagogy: it is the power of those those who cry louder.
Glory goes to those who amuse the crowds: football players, singers, actors. Most great people are almost unknown outside their circles.
Love doesn’t make an exception: it is far away from the romantic irrational feeling, without any compromise. It is more complicated, it has a much more material and chemical basis, making lovers and OCDs not very different² 
An adult Juliet would surely subscribe an insurance policy in case of her death and Romeo would surely forget about Juliet’s death and move over after a while.
In order to free our lives from false truths, we must abjure these illusions and understand the real mechanisms of the world: wars, power struggles, corruption, compromises. We should be able to use these against whatever the fortune throws at us.
But if we were permitted to take a souvenir from our past lives, to make an illusion true, I have no doubt what I would choose: love. Everything else is worth dying for, but it’s certainly not worth living for. I hope that my friends managed in some mysterious way (for me), to make that wish come true.
¹Which roughly translates into:
Romeo and Julia are just two children that fall in love each for the other and they throw themselves entirely into it. They see in a very theoretical way what often changes in the adult age, because one doesn’t believe in love any more.
² Ig Nobel prize 2000 for Chemistry.
