The Book of Love: The Story of Françesca and Leon

The Book of Love — The Story of Françesca and Leon.

Here is the atmosphere of our modern age, or perhaps we could say, also in a dimension out of space and time, to express, through the golden thread of a delicate and touching love story. This is the story of victory over Death clearing the way for the appearance of an advanced superior race of beings. Deshpande’s text is drawing to the portion of the two young people’s meeting in the epic by Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book 5, The Book of Love.
It is really difficult to choose some extracts from the Story of Françesca and Leon, in Deshpande’s text, to summarise the events and their intense contents. So many are the expressions, lyric-poetic, musical, bright, sentences in their joy and beauty, deep in their greatness, dancing in a rich profusion, and they run throughout the narration. The theme itself is a revolution, the victory of Love against Death, through the creation of a new body, never materialised before, but waited, with the psychic being as a starting point.
In the teaching of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, the psychic being represents the individual soul that is reincarnating life after life, and growing up in different bodies during the evolution, to arrive to the full realisation and self-expression, and to build through its materialisation the new body itself, a body that knows no death.
During the narration the many different stories that are unfolding and especially the one of the two protagonists, are expressing the contents of Integral Yoga and some of the yogic experiences of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, in an apparently simple and clear but very profound language. Indeed, joy and love or perhaps we could say the Joy and the Love are always pervading the narration together with the Knowledge.
We can only be grateful to Deshpande’s revolutionary effort aimed at making available to us, in a soft and gentle manner, full of enthusiasm, such deep and high teaching and knowledge.
The story of Françesca and Leon is unfolding in Topland Park, a magic and marvellous place, even if in the middle of the buzz of the terrestrial life, where we can see a great transformation taking place: “The values of the spirit in the expressions of life, — that is what is being attempted.”
The reference of the author is one experience of the Mother, who in 1965 was writing:
This central point is a park I had seen when I was a little girl, a park with water and trees like all parks, and flowers, but not too many, palm trees and ferns, a small waterfall — running water.
Here all belongs to another dimension, which is at the same time human and spiritual. The nature is rich and friendly, it is intensely participating in the life and in the story through which it is running. The horizon is embracing high mountains and lanes, in a wide richness of trees, flowers, waters where many birds and different animals are living, in a sanctuary, in a sovereign harmony and peace.
This is the story of victory over Death clearing the way for the appearance of an advanced superior race of beings. Deshpande’s text is drawing to the portion of the two young people’s meeting in the epic by Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book 5, The Book of Love.