A few years ago I watched the film „The Painted Veil”. It was so sad. It was like drinking water from a well in a small train station, where the bucket and the tin cup are overused and have a strange taste.
I found there a comparison between the meaning of true love and the meaning of lies and running out of self respect. It was a cover for the true meaning of duty and also an honest analysis of human life, confronting tragic realities.

What shook my dreams’ foundation watching that film was the song , an adaptation of a French old folk song „à la claire fontaine”, „by the clear fountain” in translation. A sad song about a lost love and what becomes a broken heart who cannot understand what it possesses until it loses everything. I had once a small piano-toy and when I was eighteen I decrypted exactly that song from a French book. It was painful to remember those days of my youth, when I believed I was in love with a man who did not love me at all, constructing sand castles in my mind and such a beautiful and surreal portrait of him, who was, as you can guess, only a heartbreaker, a man not worthy of my total devotion and sacrifices for him.

In the film a doctor endangers his infidel wife’s life in a cholera stricken area and in the end he dies, leaving her a bitter-sweet memory. Then she becomes the real wife of that man, only after losing him. She forgave him and took the blame upon her, this is what I felt.

Then I watched another film “The English Patient”. There a married couple dies: the infidel woman and her revengeful husband. After a chain of events, the intruder, precisely the man who conquered that woman’s life, also dies, trying desperately to save his loved one’s life.

I realized that these drama stories are similar to my beliefs: marriage bonds are a sacred mystery and breaking those ties leads to disasters, either in the outside world, or in the souls of the victims of such passions. Love hurts and everyone knows that.
I understood that it is necessary not only to tame our passions and aim for self-control and reasonable goals, but also to be more egoistical in order to survive.
But who can do this? Self-pity or too much pride or selfish love can lead to disasters. Giving everything to others can also lead to disasters. To obtain equilibrium is almost impossible, as long as humans are imprisoned in a fragile and pain inducing body, where the power of thoughts and loving feelings are the only way to escape over the borders.

In some situations forgiving others and taking the blame upon ourselves is the only way further. Revenge leads to loss of everything, except for the wise philosophical conclusions kept in a secret diary. Othello is always punished by his own self for his powerful jealousy or too strong love, not for the fact that he was duped by others. All passions can be parts of a greater death toll (like epidemics, wars, loss of innocent lives).