"Le Château des Pyrénées" by René Magritte
"Can we make a solemn promise to delete every email we send each other after we've read them? I mean straight away, right then and there, and that naturally means no printouts either....We will step outside time, leave what we call ‘reality’."
~ Jostein Gaarder, The Castle in the Pyrenees
For Steinn and Solrun, the Internet is their reconnection, the means by which they rekindle what was lost so long ago. This is probably the seventh novel I read for Gaarder, and I am again captivated by his storytelling, by his views on the universe, our footprint on the planet, and definitely on love. I get lost inside the stories within stories. I am still in the beginning, but I know it already got to me.
and then she tells him (referring to the painting above):
" But perhaps you're blind. Perhaps you're both narrow-minded and short-sighted.
Do you remember that Magritte picture of a huge lump of rock floating above the ground? I think it had a small castle on top. You can't have forgotten that picture.
But if you'd witnessed something similar today, you would certainly have tried to explain it away. Maybe you'd have said it was a trick. That the rock was hollow and filled with helium. Or that it was supported by an ingenious network of invisibly pulleys and wires.
I'm a much simpler soul. I would probably just have raised my arms to the boulder and sung out my 'hallelujah' or my 'amen'."
...and thus speaks the emotional to the rational. They are lovers who were separated by space and time, meeting again -by coincidence or some universal masterplan- after 30 years. Trying to understand each other, trying to understand what drove them apart.
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"It's strange to think about now. That was before I believed in anything. But only just before."
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