picture in my mind

SPOILER FOR LYMOND CHRONICLES

"Perhaps you've married the wrong brother. And that would be a pity. Because Francis lives in a passionless vacuum and keeps his love for abstract things."

- Richard Crawford to Mariotta, in The Game of Kings

This line hurts so much. :(

Richard, I do love you -- you are a sensible, honourable, and good man. And you are not at all stupid, by most measures of society. But next to the complexity and sensitivity that is Lymond, you can be as dense as a block of wood.

This hurts because Richard makes Francis sound like an unloving, self-seeking, egocentric, cold, persona -- but as any reader would know, Francis in truth is the exact opposite under the mask he creates (which of course implies that the bad image people have of him is his own making, deliberate or not). He's so self-sacrificial, so self-deprecating, and so deeply compassionate and altruistic -- I would have been seriously upset if he didn't get the happy ending he deserved in this series.

Then I thought again about what Richard said -- that Francis keeps his love for abstract things. And it reminded me of a conversation I had with S a long time ago now (read: long time ago is anything 5 years previous or more), when we were discussing religion. I asked her what the highest level of love an individual could possess was, and she said, "Love for the divine."

If anything, the concept of God is abstract (I've always wanted to ask an autistic person who has such difficulty with abstractness, about God -- but that's another topic for another time). 

Now, the character of Francis is by no means religious, and I think at one point he did appear more as an agnostic than anything else. What I'm getting to instead is the idea that if you aspire to abstract things, or you long for abstract things -- I think it makes you bigger and greater. It is only through this reaching for this abstractness that one truly becomes selfless and all-loving. Anything other than the love of God / divine / great cosmos / BIG ABSTRACT THING, has its roots in selfishness. 

To think that Francis killed his own child at one point for the greater good -- a man who doesn't believe in abstract things would't have been able to do that.