The world of emotions is so powerful that it can easily confuse, even overwhelm us making us blind for the physical world as it really is. Undeniably, emotions can give strength, but they can just as well drain it and bring people on the verge of desperation or madness. Sometimes they drive people to do things – good or evil – that seem completely out of their line and that they themselves might have thought impossible before. And memories can revive them in an instant as the young protagonist of the 1955 novel A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen, which I picked as a bookish déjà vu this week, learns when she finds a packet of old love letters in a trunk in the attic and unintentionally sets in motion a maelstrom of long suppressed emotions in the people whom she has known all her life mentioning her find at table.

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