The pill of desire

This article is published in Vanity Fair issue 20-21 on newsstands until May 25, 2021

Alas, I know nothing of love. Is it a dream or a sign? A hot look or a teasing breath? A puzzle or a solution? This honest profession of ignorance alone is enough to qualify me as an expert on desire. Come on, passion is a mystery and science believes instead that it can answer all questions. What time does the heat stop, when cuddling becomes a habit, because after a couple of years one wakes up badly, and discovers that champagne has become chamomile.

The fact is that now some emeritus scientists announce the wish pill; a psychological vasodilator that is supposed to mate with the other famous hydraulic vasodilator called Viagra. Once the experimentation is over, we will have the antidote to the so-called “anemia of desire”. As if to say: the panacea for all virtual and vicious evils. Because we are like this: badly, very badly, we are insatiable. We always want everything. And its opposite.

But this is not science: it is science fiction, even fictional deficiency, often pious pharmaceutical alchemy applied to a cash register. Which, moreover, has always enjoyed great success. You know that delirium, between the superstitious and the irrational, based on chopped rhino horns, coffee grounds, crystal balls, dancing tables, spilloned dolls, in short, that sidereal “taken for the occult” of para-guru easy aphrodisiac? The result, the ultimate placebo of human destiny, will be necessary for some, but it is certainly very boring. There is only one wish that lasts until death: the last one. As it is natural that the libido delivered to the people of the mutual, the hormonal frenzy stamped like a mozzarella with the expiration date, will not save us from that dark power that is passion. A madness that, from Adam and Eve onwards, cannot be controlled with words, with tarot cards, with psychological or hydraulic pills. A scientific manual or a pharmaceutical lollipop cannot be made of an enigma. After all, desire is nothing more than a certain way of shaking the body before use. Since the passions are not in the nerves and cells, as the words of love spoken on the telephone are not in the wires: a biology of feelings has no reason to exist. Feelings are something intangible, which does not lend itself to biological and physiological reductions. So, take a seat in WH Auden’s enchanting poem: ‘Is it pungent to touch it like a plum, or light as a soft duvet? When he comes, will he come without warning? Will his greeting be courteous or quick? Will it change my whole life? The truth I beg you about love ». It is to touch this truth that, almost always, we send reason, planets in flight, scientific reports, horny pills to that country.

To subscribe to Vanity Fair, click here.