You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject.. Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize).. this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire. interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction). . Roland Barthes
About This Quote

The second line of this passage comes from a poem by Henri de Régnier. It says, “A scene is an image, a whole image which is a sum of all the separate images composing it.” The first line is a translation of a passage from Goethe. It says, “The first thing we love is a scene that is as if seen for the first time, as if it were there before our eyes, as if we were seeing it for the first time.”

Source: A Lovers Discourse: Fragments

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