..."Then there is the one who suddenly appears, from elsewhere, who breaks off from the crowd one day and comes towards us, so close that its breath mingles with our own, that its face enters our own. This is the lover, who becomes our body's twin: our second body. Who, although alien, because alien, becomes consubstantial to us, through the ways of desire which run oblique to those of consanguinity.
Because we have looked upon it, encircled it, caressed it, slept up against it, in its warmth and smell, because we have desired it with a desire ever-growing even at the height of its sating, we know that other as no one other knows it -- as no other can or should know it.
The lover's body is sacred, it is pure, even in the heat and groaning of fulfilled desire. It is our secret, pride and happiness -- a fertile happiness which feeds all our other moments of happiness, all our other outstretchings towards the world. It is the stone put up along the way, at each crossroads whose text is constantly renewed and which we never weary of reading, with our lips and fingers as much as with our eyes.
...
Forsaken lovers were shrinking along the walls, heads lowered, lips sealed, blue with cold. But no one noticed them -- you are so insubstantial when you plummet to reach the depths of unhappiness. The giant-woman was weeping in the cellars, crouching by the coal heaps. There in the filth and cold she was silently weeping for the pain of lovers who are no longer loved."
-'Prague Noir: The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague,' by Sylvie Germain
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