A re-telling of the true 12th century love story of Heloise and Abelard. Abelard is a great philosopher and theologian who has taken, like many academics of the time, a vow of celibacy. When he is hired as a tutor for the brilliant and beautiful Hel...
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In Argentuil, I spent my days by the light of my dusty desk. Many nights, I combed through our arguments again and again - those many lines Abelard and I had spoken against skin, those many pearls of wisdom dropping to the pillows between our breaths.
It is funny, how much of philosophy is formed long before the inscribed lines of paper - how much of philosophy happens in the spoken, the unrecorded. Many of Abelard's arguments came into being in my arms, then put to paper only later - stuffed later into the curves of his letters, there was a culmination of the both of us. Do you see? I live always, silently, in his footnotes.
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I breathe through his lines. Many of them - so many of them - we had formed together, words like bricks; we alternated stacking them up. But what of this? And what of this? And let's add this... We built fortresses out of our thoughts. We had built all his books right there in our bed.
"Whatever exists is composed of every part of it."
"But does that mean whatever exists is as small as its parts or that, together, its parts become bigger than they are?"
He chews on it; he looks up to the ceiling. "The latter," he finally says, definitively. "When composed together, parts become bigger than they are alone. Greater than their sum."
"And yet they are still parts."
"I do not think so. I think they become something else," his gaze is up to the ceiling - beyond it. I loved the way thought set across his features. I could see the slight twitch in his lips. "Bread is bread; it is no longer flour and water and yeast. And you could mix the flour and water and yeast together in some other way, and still it would not be bread."*
"The parts cease to be, then? Flour and water and yeast cease to be, once they become bread?"
"I don't know yet, Heloise. It possesses me, this question..."
"How about when the bread molds, and when it decomposes to the ground, is it still bread?"
"Ha," he laughs, "you wish to make me mad with your questions."
