The Enduring Kiss

The kiss is the image that, perhaps more than any other, encompasses the beauty and poetry of love. Every love is required to maintain the kiss, to make it last. When they kiss, lovers carve out a space for themselves, find their peace from war. When they kiss the noise of the world is silenced, its laws broken, time is stolen from its normal continuity. They join together in their distinct, embraced tongues. The kiss joins the tongue that declares love with the body of the lover. And the extinction of the kiss - or more importantly, of the desire to kiss - is the beginning of the end of love. In this short book, Massimo Recalcati - one of Italy's leading intellectuals and bestselling authors - offers seven brief lessons on the mystery and miracle of love, from the serendipity of the first encounter to its end or its continuation over time, as mysterious and miraculous as the first encounter itself.