Love and Longing on the home front: Barbara’s journey

Most of us have a love-hate relationship with novels set during the Second World War. It is a historical period that has always fascinated us, as only the highest and lowest moments of human history can. Pegasus Road centres on Barbara, a young woman working her family’s farm in England during the Second World War, and Andrew, the man she loves, who has gone off to fight. Pegasus Road narrates Barbara’s experience of waiting and hoping on the home front and Andrew’s life as a soldier facing the dangers and uncertainty of war. Let us explore themes of love, longing, resilience and the personal costs of war, showing how hope and determination can endure even in the darkest times.

Pegasus Road will move you, leave a mark and is not easily forgotten. Here, we embrace Barbara’s different ways of coping with war in her country, with loss, and with resistance. It is authentic, which makes everything its protagonist goes through all the more terrifying. This book is one of the reasons we fell in love with her. It is a story of survival on the ground in occupied France, Normandy. A strategic position during the war, which will determine the fate of several of its protagonists.

In our daily lives, we tend to perceive love in its concrete form, seeing it in its manifest expression: a mother's love, a child's love, a friend's love, a partner's love... A love from someone and for someone, even if that "someone" is all of humanity, solidarity itself.

Barbara’s Love and Longing

There is this love that creates and destroys, that sets conditions, that responds to needs, that becomes intertwined with our desires, that often hides behind fear. A love that acts with a planned, predetermined roadmap, a love hypnotized by form and how it should be. And alongside it, we find another, yet the same; a still, calm, empty, silent love... A vehement, intimate, radical desire. A love free and liberated from form, from doing, from duty. A love that responds to our own Being. A love that, then, presents itself to us as a foundation, as a bedrock. The basis of any possible manifestation. Therefore, it is the source of our concrete relationships of love.

This is the love Barbara calls love as longing.

Ultimate foundation and longing, at once? Herein lies the paradox.

Looking at love beyond its concrete forms, passing through its appearance, its outward manifestation is revealed in Pegasus Road- a shared, profound, and heartfelt love. A universal source is revealed.

Let us look at it attentively, let us pass through the various layers in which love manifests itself (all legitimate, of course). Let us also pass through our desires. Let us cross the dense forest until we reach its clearing. In it, we discover a free space, empty and full at the same time. Everything is there, and nothing is there at once.

In and from that emptiness, Barbara rediscovers love, this time as deepest identity. A love that resonates within her for Andrew.

But what has brought her? What has shown the way? How...?

That which truly compels Barbara to be discovered, in the face of everyday blindness, is the pervasive hypnosis of the realm of appearance.

Love manifests itself, thus, as longing. It calls to awaken.

As she feels the warmth of the sun on her body, she feels the warmth of this longing, which gathers and embraces. Slowly, carefully, gently, it leads and guides her towards a more radical identity than she is accustomed to, an identity that no longer has anything to do with her personal biography. Her past and future are suspended for a moment.

This longing for Andrew leads Barbara to the other side of the “fence of appearance,” and yet it is here. It happens now. Here and now.

We remember the drawings in those books called “The Magic Eye,” which we played with, trying to discover the 3D image hidden in a flat, 2D pattern. When the magic of three-dimensional drawing occurred, we felt we had crossed a boundary and a new world opened before us. Reality was no longer as we saw it at first glance. Hidden within lay a marvellous secret.

Similarly, with that playful attitude (but with attention and intention focused on it), Barbara only has to look to notice what previously went unnoticed. And, behind a flat reality, the secret is revealed to her; a new reality appears. She has to find Andrew. Everything takes on a different tone, a different aroma.

The yearning we speak of would then be an impulse toward our own nature, toward our own reality, which is in turn shared, universal. Yearning is the engine that moves us toward its encounter. The direction of this impulse is determined by the depth of our gaze.

In this sense, we speak of Love as longing and as a radical nature.

Love as longing for Barbara in Pegasus Road is love pointing towards itself, which is ultimately her centre. The love that "confines of appearance." Thus, Andrew’s letters present themselves to us as a longing to reach out and, from there, to relate to the other. Because love manifests itself in a relationship, but it is not exhausted by it.

We move from having love to BEING love.

This new understanding and the world that surrounds us rest directly on existence itself. This new attitude allows Barbara to flow from the centre, where all possibilities and abilities arise, to be more available to see, feel and act.

Love has been a complicated theme in her life: a longing that eludes, a search for something she fears to attain. Some questions have enveloped like an aura in recent years: what is the nature of romantic love? Why has it sometimes been elusive and at other times presented itself as a duel more than with the other person?

The perspective intrigues.

Is love truly an autonomous entity that subjugates us and over which we have no control? Or, on the contrary, are feelings tied to our thoughts and therefore, do we have some degree of dominion over them? It's a dilemma she finds difficult to unravel.  We distance ourselves from the fact that we are the agents of desire and accept it as if it were imposed upon us by a cause external to ourselves. Every desire is accompanied by emotions, which we transform in many ways and adjust to various circumstances, both internal and external.