In vino veritas. Un ricordo riportato da William Afham

[Autom. eng. transl.] The first of the five writings that make up the polyphonic work Stadi on the journey of life (1845), In vino veritas is a brilliant modern interpretation of the Platonic Symposium. Five diners secretly meet to discuss love: we find Johannes, former author of the Diary of the Seducer, Victor Eremita, the editor of Enten-Eller, Constantin Constantius, author of The repetition, a young man and a tailor. If the inexperienced Young man looks at love and the relationship between the sexes from the perspective of an ideality that laboriously reconciles with the concreteness of life, the shrewd Constantin instead tells the story of a real experience declining it in the disengaged perspective of the game , of the joke, while Victor philosophically discusses the spiritual transformation that the relationship with the feminine causes in man. The tone becomes only apparently frivolous when the Tailor demonstrates his knowledge of feminine nature which would reveal itself authentically only in the relationship with fashion, and finally Johannes the Seducer engages in a praise of the eternal inexhaustible feminine in a single woman. In a poignantly romantic setting, irony and wit constantly tear the veil of melancholy to reveal the dialectical depth that lies behind the apparent surface of love choices.