Real love

In La llama doble, Octavio Paz, partially elaborating on L'amour et l'Occident, a book by Denis de Rougemont., draws a history of love One important idea of Paz is that "real love" began in the 12th Century, in Provençe, France.

At that time, Provençe (together with Aquitania, the land of my ancestors) constituted a wider region called Occitania. This is important because the Occitan language is responsible for developing the "courtly love" (fin'amor), invented by the troubadours.

According to Paz (and at some extent to de Rougemont, whose work I am not familiar with), "real love" began thanks to the troubadours, since they were the first ones who understood "woman" as a being equal to man. Before them, women were taken as inferior, merely as receptors of men, not as equivalents. This idea succeeded and started spreading around Europe in the following centuries.

I was looking forward to attend a concert (basically this one), but it turned out to be very different to what I was expecting. Honestly, it was bad and boring, and not as interesting as I was expecting it to be.