On the morning of June 18, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte did something out of character. He waited. His marshals were anxious. The man who had turned speed into a military philosophy was watching the morning burn off. Simone Weil would have recognised this immediately as a failure of attention. And attention, for Weil, was everything.

Perhaps what I'm describing is simply the movement from romanticism to realism, from the aesthetics of intensity to the ethics of attention. Perhaps it is only that I have loved and been loved enough times to know that the experience bears little resemblance to its representations.

Our biology insists on honesty even when our psychology does not. The flush rising in our cheeks, tears springing to our eyes, our voice breaking when we speak of what matters. We are, whether we like it or not, transparent.