Don't worry. It's only mildly contagious.

Everyone loves Raimond

We become like we love, said Plato. At least, Raimond Gaita said he did and when you’re sitting in a room, listening to his voice echo off the walls, following the swing of those eyes between the next table over and yours, it's best to take his word for it.

I read Romulus My Father, like a lot of people, in Year 11 Literature, before I had any idea of what losing people meant. I read The Philosopher’s Dog a few years after that, when I did.

Hearing Raimond speak, in a private La Trobe University seminar, was by far one of the most exciting moments for me at the Bendigo Writers Festival. I watched everyone pick clean the buffet of gourmet sandwiches, but there was a shaking in my shoulders; it had spread from my gut, and I was too nervous to eat. (Making this perhaps one of three times in my entire life that I had willingly passed up free food.)

Raimond came in without much pomp or ceremony, grabbing a glass of water, shrugging out of a jacket, and lingering around near our table to speak with the organizers. (I definitely wasn’t eating anything.) He began by reading to us from one of his latest essays, a piece in his usual hybrid: part memoir and part philosophy. It was about love.

Sharing what we love is the most basic human pleasure, He said. Love always asks to celebrate what it loves.

He spoke of the two men who had shared with him their passions: Hora, his father’s best friend, and then later on, a favourite university professor. There is nothing finer for a teacher to do than that, he said. To put in the way of their students the finest, most beautiful things possible.

It occurred to me then that this entire subject, anchored here as it was at the Bendigo Writers Festival, was doing just that. It was a celebration, an opportunity of some kind. We were surrounded by authors and editors and critics and really enthusiastic readers, we were being shown every day what it was they loved and why they loved it. 

The existence of love in one person - be it love for literature or art or beauty – can awaken it in another, Raimond said.

For me, it became a revival of love rather than a fresh infection. As far back as I can remember, probably since Lyn White slapped down Harry Potter on my desk in Grade One; or back further still, to those nights learning to read with my sister on the couch; since then, I have wanted to write stories.

To be at the Bendigo Writers Festival was to celebrate that love, whether it was for writing or for reading, for the world pressed between two pages or backlit by a Kobo screen. We all sat in that room with Raimond to share in it, we all came to Bendigo to enjoy it.

And I walk away from the experience now more alive with this love than ever before. 

I only wish I hadn't left my copy of Romulus My Father at home in Melbourne.