In the spring of my sophomore year of college I took a poetry seminar that alternated between reading and writing assignments, depending on the week. One week we read Shakespeare, the next we wrote sonnets; one week we read Wordsworth, the next we wrote pastoral poems. As the weather slipped out of early, ambiguous spring and firmly into warm weathered May, we read Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and pondered poetry of celebration, art, and desire. I searched high and low for my own grecian urn and found it in the shape of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Kiss.
The Kiss: in the 7th Arrondissement of Paris, Rodin takes two of Dante’s comedic sinners and immortalizes their wayward love in sculpted marble. The piece tells the story of the Italian noblewoman Francesca da Rimini (a real person from the 13th century who was so notable that she ended up in The Divine Comedy), who falls in love with her husband Giovanni’s younger brother, Paulo, when they read the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere together in the garden.
Coincidentally, the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere is also one of adultery and the betrayal of brethren. And when King Arthur discovers that his wife and his most loyal knight are together in her bedchambers, Lancelot and Guinevere are banished, and live the remainder of their lives as a hermit and a nun, respectively. Though if I were to hedge my best academic bet, I’d say that Francesca and Paulo didn’t make it to that part of the story.
In medieval Italy, Giovanni catches the amorous duo and slays his own kin just as they gravitate towards each other — Rodin shows the two lovers, intertwined, in this moment before their passion is realized and their tale is capitulated. The book of Arthurian stories falls from Paulo’s hands, forgotten in the fury of the present, and, up close, you can see that the lovers’ lips do not quite touch.
What heavy desires float in that ossified millimeter of space, what weeping possibilities fill the tiny ether. Outside of Dante and Rodin’s realms of fiction, where timelines are nebulous and love less dramatic, desire fades, relationships rip. Time takes care of everything, sorting romances into lovely continuations and frustrating cycles and bittersweet endings as it sees fit. But not for the lusting lady Francesca and her forbidden soulmate. They exist in this state forever, pure bliss. All of the excitement. None of the everlasting mess.
That same spring, the spring when I took the poetry seminar, my great love began in earnest. Eventually it ended in earnest, too. But before the earnestness ballooned and took over, before the earth turned so many times and spat us out, there was a moment of delightful simplicity, utter possibility. A moment of soft yellow light, of summer in the heart. Our heads had floated towards each other but didn’t quite touch. And what if they never had?
Of course, I regret nothing. I am young and already I know that regrets are little dollops of wasted time. We learn, we experience, we change. We experienced such a beautiful thing, even if it came to an end. And I think back to that day, a weirdly warm day in January, and it’s so funny - I remember exactly how I felt, every millisecond of it. I was jealous of Francesca and Paulo when I stumbled upon a Philadelphian recreation of Rodin’s Kiss a few months later, jealous of how they were frozen in such a holy moment, never having to confront the reality of heart break, as I have had to do.
But it turns out I’m not sorry that our lips touched. I’m not sorry at all.