Day 5

Zeno expresses the truth that romantic love is a fantasy: of Ada, he says, “She was the woman I had chosen, she was therefore already mine, and I adorned her with all my dreams, so that the prize of my life would appear more beautiful to me.” Not, generally, a good recipe for a relationship…

Zeno, like so many of us, endlessly overthinks things, trapped in “what-ifs” and self-doubt. When he kissed Ada’s hand, was it the right thing or the wrong thing to do? What if the Malfenti’s force Ada to marry him? ...but it will emerge that he has—as so often—entirely misread the situation, as Signora Malfenti suggests he has been compromising Augusta, not Ada.

Zeno’s agonies arise from uncertainty—but alas, uncertainty, in human relationships, is the condition of life. As he says, “What’s definitive is always calm, because it is detached from time.”