Because this is what it looks like when the best of worlds meet, Scando boys in West Coast sunshine. And because Jonathan Franzen's Freedom has been one of our summer readings during flights and pool sides. These are a few noteworthy lines we would like to share.

He nodded and ate, and it occurred to her that she was a person who dwelt in fantasies with essentially no relation to reality.
/.../

"It's not you. You're a good-looking chick. You just may be too nice for New York. It's a pretty naked economy there."
"But how come there are so many girls like me? And no guys? Did the good guys all decide to go somewhere else?"
Katz cast his mind over the young males of his acquaintance in greater New York, including his former bandmates, and could think of not one whom he would trust on a date with Jessica. "Girls all come for publishing and art and nonprofits," he said. "The guys come for money and music. There is a selection bias there. The girls are good and interesting, the guys are all assholes like me. You shouldn't take it personally."
/.../

"So let's go. I want to see it. I want to sleep with you."
"That sounds great," he said, "but I think my mom might be uncomfortable with it."
"I want to sleep near you. And then I want to have breakfast with you."
"That we can arrange."

Because one of our many good ideas is Google Sex, a search engine function that filters out all the porn and instead focus on the educative, healthy and pleasurable sides of love making. Although we do like the versatile spelling of e-mails saying: "Find sexual partners o-nline! Ho-o-kup fo-r sex no-w!". We sent this suggestion to the Googleplex a few months ago, and seeing no signs of a Thank you-note or the actual service we doubt they saw the value in it. Another idea is something we like to called Monki fiction, where we suggested that the fashion brand make their customer magazine somewhat more worthy of a read by including shorter stories on e.g. romantic topics. We attached a story with the title “Listen to the sea lions” but have had no sign of interests from these editors either. We do love the whole concept of feedback, like if we feel that you are one of the kindest, most decent, softest and sexy moustached man we’ve come across, with a great attitude and an excellent lover, we would want you to know it.

Because confindence comes not from always being right, but from not fearing to be wrong. And it is the mix of stellar coolness and utter vulnerability that makes this dude so desirable. Although, if we would run into James, over a cup of grande drip coffee, we would suggest he loose that piece of man jewellery. And because we read some very good stories over at Random House. One, by Maria A. from New Jersey, with a few phenomena lines like;

1/02. Watch grandmother's funeral; realize you can only cry for boys who do not like you.

9/02. Start essays like this a;lkfdh;alsjdf;laksdahiosdf; then sigh, then backspace, then start again. Read cliffnotes for Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Because we adore that you are the prefect mix of a rock star and academic, and comment on our new potential job with economic-philosophical arguments. Although, the three questions anyone needs to know is; Can you do the job?, Will you love the job? and Can we stand having you around? And because we are amused by the description of a person "as someone who wears normal-sized clothes" and that a jar can contain "honey from within the European Union and honey from outside the European Union". And that the husband of Zadie Smith say that "time is how you spend your love".

Because with that timeless beauty and sophistication, you look like a character out of the world of Scott F. Fitzgerald. And since we are fantastically successful in mastering our New Year's resolution of FOCUS, Tender is the night will provide the romance until we reap equal victories in the area of LOVE.

He seemed kind and charming - his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her, unroll an endless succession of magnificent possibilities. /.../

"I was watching you," he said, and she knew he meant it. "we've grown very fond of you."
"I fell in love with you the first time I saw you," she said quietly. He pretended not to have heard, as if the compliment were purely formal. /.../

She did not know yet that splendor is something in the heart; at the moment when she realized that and melted into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret. /.../

When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds' wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her. She felt wildly happy, felt the warm sap of emotion being pumped through her body. /.../

Yet think she must; she knew at last the number on the dreadful door of fantasy, the threshold to the escape that was no escape; she knew that for her the greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think - or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipine your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you. /.../

Tangled with love in the moonlight she welcomed the anarchy of her lover.

Because we do have a thing for Russians. And it is fascinating to walk around the Met and find pretty boys from the late eighteen hundreds. This man is called Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin and apparently liked double figures, born in 1955 and died 33-years-old in 1888, by throwing himself down a stairwell. Before that this handsome author ("published approximately twenty stories, many of which powerfully express his pacifist beliefs, his love of beauty, and his aversion to evil") was turned into oil on canvas by Ilia Efimovich Repin.

And because this makes us think of fellow country man of his, a charming character from Philip Roth's My Life As A Man, who we most ceratainly would like to get to know better. "Agniashvily, an elderly Russian émigré who wrote original "Ribald Classics" (in Georgian, and translated into English for the class by his stepson, a restauranteur by trade) aimed at the Playboy "market"..."

The same book also includes a wonderful piece of advice:
"I wanted to hang a sign over my desk saying ANYONE IN THIS CLASS CAUGHT USING HIS IMAGINATION WILL BE SHOT. I would put it more gently when, in the parental sense, I lectured them. "You just cannot deliver up fantasies and call that 'fiction.' Ground your stories in what you know. Stick to that. Otherwise you tend, some of you, toward the pipe dream and the nightmare, toward the grandiose and the romantic - and that's no good."

Because a tan and stripes is a very good combination. And with that cool air of an American dude, it reminds us of the male character from One Day, David Nicholls' best-selling love story which contains several grains of truth.

He wonders if he still might tell her that he loves her or, more tentatively, that he 'thinks he might be in love with her', which is both more touching and easier to back out of.
/.../

He picks up the phone. He is frankly drunk now, and with drunkenness has come the old compulsion: to say something stupid to an attractive woman.

And from the leading lady;

'Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will.' Her lips touched his cheek. 'I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.'
/.../

'Oxfordshire. Very nice,' she said, privately mortified at the speed with which initimacy evaporates, to be replaced by small talk. Last night they had said and done all those things, and now they were like strangers in a bus queue. The mistake she had made was to fall asleep and break the spell. If they had stayed awake, they might still have been kissing now, but instead it was all over and she found herself saying; 'How long will that take then? To Oxfordshire?'

They met at the Swedish Chamber of Commerce's crayfish party. To him, a casual affair. Forgetting that's how all great love stories begin.

Give us 140 characters and that's the story. We've met a man who we could, and have, easily write the world's longest novel on his virtues and beauty, how calm and beautiful he makes us feel, and how in our heart of hearts we just know that two old souls has met again. Of course, this freaks guys out. We ought to know that by now. But we are humans, acting in self-interest, sometimes stupidly so, and if our romantic pursuits have come to anything it is courting this man until he realizes that his future happiness depends on it. Frankly, my dear, we have never been so sure of anything before.

Because spring sunshine is followed by summer sun and swimming. And because standing on that yatch makes you look like a modern day Baron, similar to our new discovery Edward Bulwer-Lytton. First Baron Lytton, who not only coined the utterly romantic opening line; "It was a dark and stormy night" but also wrote the one-and-only manual to success; "Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm... it is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it."

In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one's thoughts be diverted by anything, by meals, by a fly that settles on one's cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That's why it is difficult to live.

We ususally find life pretty easy, but Albert Camus has a point in The Plague. Not that living is hard, but about brain capacity. Although certain persons tend to move into our brain, with age and by acquiring other passions, we've become better at diverting the mind towards trees, entrepreneurial dinosaurs and the importance of play. To blend out with the boy-think.

Because, as Albert Camus writes in The Plague;

"... a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart."

Because you look like a magestic creature which we dream of rolling "over together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and legs" and that it can be either "like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten...". Reading The Chronicles of Narnia while rain is pouring down we get more and more convince that fantastic men, or simply the feeling of passion, are pretty much like Aslan the lion.

At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.
/.../

His voice was deep and rich and somehow tooke the fidgets out of them. They now felt glad and quiet and it didn't seem awkward to them to stand and say nothing.

Excerpts from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. Photo by Sandra Beijer

Because you are black-and-white men, smoking cigarettes and carrying paperbacks in your pockets, looking like models just by leaning against a wall. And because Jack Kerouac said; "Maybe that's what life is...a wink of the eye and winking stars.”

We just finished Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and let us share a few of the more memorable quotes concerning our favorite topics;

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of neccesity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.
/.../

What is flirtation? One might say that it is behaviour leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is the promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
/.../

Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

Sunday actually lived up to its name today, and although we had the day off, rode bikes, drank beer and counted church towers, some complicated kissing works any day of the week.

It was a soft and gentle kiss, one not meant to lead beyond itself. I would probably not have kissed Midori that day if we hadn't spent the afternoon on the laundry deck in the sun, drinking beer and watching a fire, and she probably felt the same. After a long time of watching the glittering rooftops and the smoke and the red dragonflies and other things, we had felt something warm and close, and we both probably wanted, half-consciously, to preserve that mood in some form. It was that kind of kiss. But as with all kisses, it was not without a certain element of danger.
The first one to speak was Midori. She held my hand and told me, with what seem like some difficulty, that she was seeing someone. I said that I had sensed as much.
"Do you have a girl you like?" she asked.
"I do," I said.
"But you're always free on Sundays, right?"
"It's very complicated," I said.

Excerpt from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, 2000.

-Har Jan aldrig förr tyckt så mycket om nån, så att ni har fått hjärtklappning fördenskull? sa barnmorskan.
-Nääj, sa Jan.
Men i samma stunden begrep han vad det var, som hade satt hjärtat igång på honom. Och inte nog med det, utan han började också ana vad som hade varit felet med honom i hela hans liv. För den, som inte känner av sitt hjärta varken i sorg eller i glädje, det kan säkert inte räknas som en riktig människa.

A handsome boy recommended that we should read Kejsarn av Portugallien by Selma Lagerlöf, and just we love taking good advice.

- Du kom te mig i natt i drömmen, så var det, ja. Du kom te mig, å jag sa så här: "Är du ute och går, Jan i Askerdala?" - "Nej", sa du, "nu heter jag Jan i Längtedalarna." - "Jaså, välkommen!" sa jag. "Där har jag bott i hela mitt liv."

The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't.

Only, I wonder - the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?

First published in 1920, The Age of Innocence certainly confirms the very familiar concept of history repeating. But Edith Wharton wasn't a fan of "that kind of innocence, the innocene that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience." Neither are we. Let's stick to the wildy beating hearts.

Spending some time with Murakami made us realize that these natural disasters cannot possibly ravage the Earth without bringing at least some awe-inspiring love along the way.

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains - flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions.

He thought of the woman. Now he would have given all he had or ever might have to hold her warm in his arms, both of them wrapped in one blanket, and sleep. All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.

Oh, yes. We too wanna be wrapped up in a blanket of shooting stars and sunlight. It might not be Lady Chatterley's Lover taking a nap above, but D.H. Lawrence's character certainly has some wonderful points in the 1928 novel.

"Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy."

It always reassuring to find our thoughts put to words by Nobel prize winners. Love in the time of cholera is an wonderful example of the genius of Gabriel García Márques and the human race's infinite and eternal search for passion.

From the first moonlit night, both of them broke their hearts in the fierce love of inexperience. But Angeles Alfaro left as she had come, with her tender sex and her sinner's cello, on an ocean liner that flew the flag of oblivion, and all that remained of her on the moonlit roofs was a fluttered farewell with a white handkerchief like a solitary sad dove on the horizon, as if she were a verse from the Poetic Festival. With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: "My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse."