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Letters to the Heart
*
Do you love Me? Alice asked.
No, I don’t love you! replied the White Rabbit.
Alice frowned and clasped her hands together as she did whenever she felt hurt.
See? replied the White Rabbit. Now you’re going to start asking yourself what makes you so imperfect and what did you do wrong so that I can’t love you at least a little…
The first time I saw you I made a pact with myself: I will avoid loving you until you learn to love yourself.
~ Lewis Carrol
*
“Dear Marco, I went to my doctor this morning… ”
Marguerite didn’t remember writing that. And who was Marco?
But when she re-read the letter, she understood everything: Marco was Marco Aurelius, and the author of the letter was Emperor Adrian. She had written it herself, years earlier, inspired by a trip with her father to Villa Adriana, under the sun of an Italian spring. The letter was an outline of a story that had fallen asleep… until that moment.
And as she herself would write afterwards:
From that moment on, for me it was just a matter of writing that book, at any cost.
This is how the Memoirs of Adrian was born, a masterpiece of the 20th century…
