Client L., 8 am.

As warned, she is in love and, certainly, she displayed all the physiological symptoms of that condition. Normally containing herself within a narrow range of feeling and self consoling, today she was wider eyed, alert, somewhat giddy.  The absence of her beloved was everywhere and within seconds I was exhausted watching her. I found my rug interesting. I wondered if I needed a pee. And yet what should have been the clearest road into her soul soon turned into something more concerning. As a materialist, an atheist, as a neuroscientist working for a pharmacuetical company, client L. has no use for the soul. She calls it a poetic construct. The only reality in town is her own, and its cellular.

I'm in love, she said. I met him at a Pharma conference and we sat together for a week. But Roger's gone back to Australia. So, not unrequited, but impossible.

Not impossible, no. We Skype all the time.

Then the most extraordinary thing. Her eyes dimmed, she narrowed into her shoulders, and began speaking.

Of course it is. How often will I see him? Once a year? It is impossible. But you see, that's what love is. It's a madness, a divine madness. We are supposed to try and make love into a concrete relationship, but maybe it has nothing to do with relationships. It's not about making a perfect life. Love is an event of the soul. It has one foot in this world and one foot in eternity. Love is an initiation into experience, that is all. It has nothing to do with a man called Roger. Do you know what Ficino said? What Novalis said? He said love was not made for this world. And Ficino, he said love was the desire for union with a beautiful object in order to make eternity available to mortal life.

And do you believe that, I asked? No answer, just a faint smile. I stretched my shoulders and yearned for the window. I imagined clambering out and sliding down a drainpipe. This was the most inauthentic shit I'd heard in two hundred years of therapy. Where was the anguish, the agony of her love? And her, quoting Ficino to me? What was my Renaissance master doing in her laboratory? Although every word she spoke was true, it's expression was entirely false. Our time was up. I lifted my eyes slowly from the floor and nodded goodbye to the back of her head. She was gone. I threw open the window, desperate not to breathe any of her air. It was then, on impulse, I went and sat in her chair. I looked around me, noting the books on the nearest shelf, and there it was: Care of The Soul by Thomas Moore, 1st edition. Client L. has been reading Thomas Moore. I opened the book and turned to the chapter on love. In fact, she had been quoting him almost verbatum. Ah, client L, the cleverest girl in the class. She had been doing her homework.