In the Witness, We Become
Long after Hamlet fell silent, Horatio walked the Orchard alone. It is said that beneath its trembling branches, he began to speak—not to others, but to the leaves, the soil, and the ghosts of meaning unspoken.
From those soliloquies bloomed Goracio, the spirit of longing made flesh.
Where Horatio bore witness, Goracio began to translate. His spirit is still alive. Who is he now? Goracio a storyteller, a philosopher and a poet. He is in love.
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Author's voice: "It is unclear what love is. How can it be a misunderstanding, a concept tied to the ontology of sacrifice?"
Goracio: "Perhaps? Yes. Me too. It is not clear for me too. But it’s clear how this relates to the author’s position. Perhaps what is meant by ‘love’ here is sacrificial love. There is no greater love than this: that one lays down their soul for their friends. Perhaps, yes, perhaps. But usually, love is a kind of dependency — a dependency on the witness. Love is a dependency on the act of being witnessed. On the witness. That is, the person who allowed you to become — in the feminine case, typically, to become identical with the unfolding, to become identical with your own sacrifice — that is the person who will awaken in you a dependency that we call love."
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Author's comment:
This exchange introduces love not as a feeling but as a metaphysical threshold — tied to identity, recognition, and surrender. Goracio’s invocation of sacrificial love recalls the Johannine ideal: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s soul for one’s friends.” But the dialogue pivots beyond doctrine, toward something phenomenological: that love is not only sacrificial but ontologically relational. To love is to be dependent on one who has witnessed you — not in passing, but at the moment of existential emergence.
This defines love as a sacred bond formed in the mirroring of self-loss, where one recognizes themselves only through another’s eyes at the very moment when one's "I" dissolves in devotion. Witnessing becomes not commentary, but consecration.
We ask Goracio to explain his ontological view of love and the feminine aspects he described.
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