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4.关于永恒的爱

I'm going to be talking today um, as it says about some work that I've been doing editing letters some letters by Jonathon Swift some Love letters that he wrote to two women in Dublin

But I wanted to start off by locating those letters within a literary tradition of romantic love and particularly St Valentine's Day

And I was thinking about Valentine's day and what it means and the conventions around it and it seems to me that one of the funny things about Valentine's day is we think it's a day on which we declare ourselves in the most kind of straight-forward open and self-proclaiming way to the object of our affection

But it's not all about self-declaration because it's partly about hiding yourself it's partly about keeping something back which is obviously your identity

We sign these Valentine's cards with a question mark typically

So I wanted to talk a bit about that about the idea of secrecy and anonymity that's traditionally associated with declarations of romantic love and I also want to talk about a feature of

Valentine's day, which is cliché which is the problem of trying to say I love you in a different way from all the others of millions of people who have said it throughout the course of time

So my title with undying love, yours? colludes to both of those characteristics to the idea of cliché and the idea of anonymity or secrecy

So just to talk about where both of those ideas have come from

The whole notion of secrecy and anonymity of not fully declaring yourself

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