Fellow Pilgrims, First of all, in the tradition of twitter, I would like to ask, “what are you doing?” I don't expect you to answer this in 140 characters or less, but that question can very well be the starting point of everything there is to know about life and your place in this universe.
Love and Suffering
It does not out work out the way romantic movies tell us. These movies conclude on an ecstatic but idealistic assumption that love ends happily ever after. Not all are lucky in love. Not all live happily ever after. Or those happily ever afters are not the ones we consistently dreamed of as happy. There are always struggles within. Relationships still break apart. Lovers reveal themselves as all too human, prone to error, temptation, and strife. Love manifests itself not as a matter of luck but a dreadful battlefield—an exhausting war of comings and goings, of sin and forgiveness, of toil and suffering. Stripped off of its eros, magic, and fantasies, what we are left with is a fragile and futile reality of love that hurts, decays, and is finite. Love, as we imagined and desired it to be, remains (reminiscent of Descartes) an elusive dream. It is an elusive dream that torments us.
A Mighty Good Man
These days, there are plenty of magazines and TV shows sprouting information about what a “real” man ought to be. If you look through any of these articles, you might find that today’s man is defined by the gadgets he owns, the car he drives, the money he earns and the number of girls he can seduce. The boy next door is passé. The metrosexual is in. This man exudes confidence and charm because deep down he knows that he really is all that. Sometimes, if you’re a lucky girl, he’ll let you see him under his armor and you will get a glimpse of his sensitive side.
The Game of Love
Housed in the Galleria Borghese in Rome is the life-sized marble sculpture of Apollo and Daphne made by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Prominent during his time, Bernini is known to have possessed the unique ability to capture in marble, the essence of a narrative moment with a shocking dramatic realism. A viewer can readily perceive this gifted ability by gazing at Apollo and Daphne, one of his famous works.
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