I fill our glasses, we drink to our calling each other tu and our newfound friendship. It’s too bad that distinction doesn’t exist in English, Erica says, because people’s preference for the informal tu or the more formal vous says a lot about them. It’s the same, she adds, without the connection being very clear to me, for people who swim parallel

Erica’s gift is to tell me that pure joy is as real as the shadow. Not more real, no, but just as real, and that’s already a lot. And for someone like me who believes that ultimate reality, the bottom line, is Raoul Dufy’s abominable little seascape, that’s good news.

“The magnificent and lamentable family of the nervous,” Proust called us, adding that we’re the salt of the earth, we the nervous, the melancholic, the bipolar, who spend our lives fighting the “black dog” of which another great depressive, Winston Churchill, spoke.

We also pass large neoclassical buildings lining piazzas drawn with a compass: too big, too circular, too empty. Under the leaden sun, they’re reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings.

And they’re still laughing later on, now a couple, when they tell their friends the story of how they met at the Vipassana session. Everyone knows it, everyone wants to hear it again and again. It’s their showpiece, their grand exploit, their golden legend. So unexpected, so unthinkable, and for that reason all the more glorious:

Everything that is real is true, by definition, nevertheless some perceptions of the real have a greater truth content than others, and they’re not necessarily the most optimistic.

Not only did I believe what I wrote there with all my heart, but I continued to believe it confidently for the next ten years, which were the best of my life. I knew that a love like that is rare, and that if you let it go by you’ll be doomed to regret it and to the bitter taste of being too slow on the uptake. Where so many others failed, I

I’ll never be one of those spiritual mountaineers we call mystics. And it doesn’t matter, because there’s a middle way between navigating the eternal snows and languishing on the valley floor. It’s what’s called, sometimes disdainfully, pasture hiking.

When Charles de Foucauld woke up in the night, no matter what time it was, he made it a principle to get up and consider that the day had begun—a radical way of treating insomnia.