## Metadata - Author: [[eurozine.com]] - Full Title: Shards of Truth - Category: #articles - URL: https://www.eurozine.com/shards-of-truth/ ## Highlights - Gathering the shards of truth isn’t easy. I’ve been thinking about these two books for a long time. But when you’re writing about an experience as timeless as love, it’s pretty hard to step outside the canon and offer a new reading of the subject. The more so as the people I study are not imagined literary characters but my next-door neighbours. And they have changed enormously over the past twenty years. Today, personal life – which we treated with such derision under communism – carries far more weight than it did then. People no longer hide behind an ideology or an idea. They are seeking to make sense of their own lives and answer questions like: what does it mean to be happy? What do you take with you when you depart this world? What will you recall in the last few minutes of your life? I once got into a conversation about this with a taxi driver who said: ‘You know what I’ll remember before I die? Sipping wine from a woman’s shoe!’ The one thing that’s certain is that we’ll all be conjuring something intensely personal.