Abelard to Heloise – Banish me, therefore, for ever from your heart – it is the best advice I can give, for the remembrance of a person we have loved guiltily can not be hurtful, whatever advances we may have made in the way of virtue.

What would your young students say, who have come so far to hear you and prefer your severe lectures to ease of a worldly life, if they should discover you secretly a slave to your passions and a victim of those weaknesses from which your rules secured them?

We are all a slave to our passions

Sometimes there are people in this world that you meet. Most of these people remain just that, passing acquaintances that further down the line you will struggle to remember their names, let alone picture their faces and it all fades into a distant past almost like a dissolving aspirin. Some acquaintances become friends, but again these come and go with only a few remaining consistent. However, occasionally you will meet someone that changes who you are and who you will become.

Sometimes you may have not even talked to that person, just seen them at a distance, but inside something has ignited. It may be curiosity, to be able to understand the thoughts in that person’s head, their views on the world and how they can make you feel as a person.

It became evident, that in Paris, only one man could fulfil Heloise’s educational needs, Peter (or as the French called him, Pierre) Abelard, a thirty-seven year old philosopher and teacher

Around the university, he made sure he remained professional, only speaking to me openly in the privacy of his small room or office. His eyes remained cool, jaw clenched towards me in company, just another student amongst many. I grew frustrated, time between our chats and meet ups became longer and longer, and often we would whisper our desires to each other with nothing coming of it.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, a Russian writer, a writer of whom I greatly admire once said, ‘We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word is spoken.

The power of love is impossible to resist.