Love:
“It’s the feeling that you don’t walk the earth but float above it…”
Two days before his death, Federico Fellini said:
“How I wish I could fall in love one more time!”
Standing on the very edge of life, he longed to experience love once more: to soar above the earth, to surrender to the one you wish to yield to, to hear the orchestra’s music within your soul…
He wasn’t speaking about a woman.
He wanted to convey that love is one of life’s magical moments.
When you love, you stop being merely human and become a fragrance.
You don’t walk the earth but float above it.
This state of being in love is the essence of life.
And it doesn’t matter what you’re in love with—whether it’s a woman, your work, the world, or life itself…
Love is neither joy nor sorrow, neither a reward nor a trial—it’s all of these together. It’s a journey to a magical, enchanted land, a path toward a mystery waiting to be uncovered.
Love always departs; everything has its end. But one state always transitions into another, and this new state may be an even greater feeling than being in love.
Today, marriages are fleeting, and former lovers are deprived of the great revelation—how beautiful it is to walk hand in hand, together, toward death. Many believe that new relationships will bring stronger sensations.
But that’s not true.
In Italian, there’s a word that cannot be fully translated into English — it is said “volere bene” and it literally means “I wish you to be well” but it truly means a lot more that “I love you so much” that regardless of outcomes of our relationship, our lives, or our futures — I want you to be well.
Regardless … of anything else.
There is “amore” — “love” and there is “volere bene” — “to be in Love” when someone becomes closer to you than anyone else.
There is “amare” — the verb “to love” and there is “volere bene” — the verb of when you wish the World for your loved one, when that loved someone, becomes closer to you than anyone else in this world, and it is real love transpiring.
“Amore” relies on presence, physical pleasure, and existential relationship…
“Amare” relies on metaphysical actionable feelings of love that emanate from you.
Yet the strongest feeling on earth is when “amare” transforms into “volere bene.”
There is nothing more important on earth than the feeling of “volere bene.”
It comes only after loving times, maybe moments, maybe months or maybe years, spent together in :amore” and those years must not strip away trust…
The loss of such a long connection is more tragic than the loss of love, and certainly more so than the loss of physical pleasure.
The loss of “volere bene” is the true, profound loneliness, the absolute emptiness.
There was a great “volere bene” between Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina.
The women of the world adored Fellini, but his final gesture was a true hymn to love for Giulietta.
Practically paralyzed, he escaped the clinic where he was recovering, when he learned Giulietta was dying in a hospital in Rome.
He found a random car, stole it and drove 500 kilometers to her hospital in order to lay down beside her in that state of “Volere Bene” until he passed away exhausted.
Soon Federico Fellini passed away — and Giulietta immediately followed.
Yours,
Dr Churchill
PS:
P.S. A remarkable illustration of love, lust, and desire.
On the set of La Dolce Vita: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ehkberg, Federico Fellini, 1960.