I just finished reading the first chapter of my favorite book. I have been going back to it for 25 years. I don’t know why I became so attached to it. Maybe it’s because right after I bought it, I encouraged a man I loved very much to write a dedication, which lets me know that at 29 I was a wife of four years? What made me so close to the characters?

I don’t remember what interested me that day in the bookstore. My only guess is that I liked the title, but I might as well have been intrigued by the description on the back cover (“Wharton’s work in “Last lovers” reminds us that what is truly valuable is not what others think, but what we do. It tells of love and death, darkness and light, the importance of work. If this beautiful book carries a moral, it is this: no one is so blind that one day he won’t see through”).

Work was very important to me. I brought this from home. My parents also showed me how important it was to get pleasure from it. That’s why I loved what I did outside the home. I sought passion and acceptance in action. But also recognition and rewards. I wanted to be applauded every day. That’s why I committed myself to work above and beyond the norm. No matter who I was at work: a rhythm teacher in a kindergarten, an instrument teacher, an event organizer, a tour guide at a museum, a bundle seller or an intendant at a water streetcar, I tried to act in my own way and noticeably.

Love and death were and are close to me. I loved my beloved ones and was forced to say goodbye to them when I wasn’t ready for it.

I feel like I review with my eyes every once in a while, and then I lose clarity of vision again. It also happens that I quite consciously choose blindness, only to find after a while that it makes me see better.

For years, I can’t decide which of the characters is closer to me. Each time I identify with each one individually and also with the relationship they have established. Is it possible to identify with a relationship? I don’t know, but I wished and wish for such relationships in my life. I tried to find the atmosphere of the meeting of the two in the sensitivity of the people I met and meet.

I don’t live like a hermit, but I have consciously moved to an island, also metaphorically. I left my old life like Jack and try to create in a way I once couldn’t. Sometimes a “bohomaz” (colorful splash) comes out and there are times when I look at the effect with surprise, as if someone was running a “brush”.

Looking back over the years, I think I left myself some of the images from the book without trying to revise them. I dreamed of finding the streets that Jack and Mirabelle walked. I imagined sitting by the Diderot monument and looking for pigeons. I wanted to play the harpsichord. But I’ve only been to Paris once – at the airport, I’ve never played the harpsichord and seeing the pigeons make me still clap my hands for them to fly away somewhere else.

However, today, I start this beautiful story once again. Each time I find something new and fresh in it. Today I am stopped for a long moment by the last sentences of the first chapter:

“It’s so rare for me to talk to someone who doesn’t just think about my blindness. It’s their blindness. So often I find myself feeling sorry for those who have to live inside the world and not outside like me. It must be really difficult for them.”

Translated by Szymon “Zachary” Mański