Manfred Schild, Giovanni Boccaccio

A scientist meets a beautiful woman in a park at night and realises that he has just met his own time. For fifteen years of his life, he has dutifully tried to record a precise, scientific account of the stories of the Decameron, but he has not understood them. So his time parades the world of these stories before his eyes. There are stories of betrayal, where wives betray their husbands because these husbands have secretly betrayed their wives with men, where young women demand their right to life when ancient men own these women but no longer love them. There is a story about a man of faith that doesn’t want to believe what he should. So he lets others believe what he can get them to for his own benefit. In such a manner, he sends the religiously delirious husband to pray on the roof, and in the meantime lets himself be taught real faith in life by the wife. There are stories of highwaymen and market prostitutes, who, beyond all bourgeois morality, throw hope of a glorious hereafter overboard and declare the veil of tears of this world a celebration. And there are, of course, also stories about love: about its beauty and its closeness to death. Carpe diem or momento mori? Boccaccio himself said in the Decameron that “…to whoso hath understanding, there is no grief like that of having lost one's time.”