Love and hate, pleasure and despair… the essence of humankind

 Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.

Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior. [Catullo, Carme 85]

I hate and I love. Why I do this perhaps you ask.

I do not know, but I sense that it happens and I am tormented. [Catullus 85]

The feelings human love generates are always the same, but the way they are expressed have changed down the ages. If in the past love sentiments were usually revealed through the verses of a poem, nowadays they are often shown through the lyrics of songs.

As soon as you fall in love you feel joyful, excited and in emotional turmoil, but when you realize that your love is unrequited or unattainable you suddenly fall apart: you think you are the only obstacle to your love fulfilment as you feel inadequate for your angel-like beloved who “floats like a feather in a beautiful world” you can’t reach.

When you are in love you have a distorted view of reality, thus seeing only the positive but often unreal features of things. You are like the people Plato describes as trapped in a cave where they could only see the shadows of things and not their essence.

In these unfavourable circumstances you tend to detest yourself until you hate yourself. This kind of feeling can be found both in classical poems of literary tradition, like Petrarch’s Sonnet number 134 or Wyatt’s Elizabethan sonnet “I Find No Peace”, and in Radiohead’s song “Creep”: “Odio me stesso”, “I hate myself”, “I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo”.

Even if it seems to be paradoxical and unexplainable, as in Catullus’ “Odi et amo”, sometimes people like suffering for love as we can read in many poems and songs (”And my delight is causer of this strife”). However this masochistic pleasure has been and still is the source from which many unforgettable lines spring up.