Commentary: The glimpse

(SZ) It's true, these days you have to be extremely careful about where, how, and with whom you appear in public. For once, this doesn't refer to the American president and his colorful past with the devilish Jeffrey Epstein. Rather, we're talking about Andy Byron, known to the world today as the recently serving, but since resigned, CEO of the New York software company Astronomer. The world will remember Byron and his equally suspended colleague Kristin Cabot primarily as victims of their secret passion, mercilessly exposed on a gigantic screen. During a live Coldplay concert in Boston, the two were unmistakably identifiable as lovers in a kind of long camera shot. When they themselves realized they had been recognized, Byron crouched down, and his companion turned around in shame. The smug and rather merciless categorization by Coldplay singer Chris Martin (either very shy or they're having an affair) did the rest. A side business aspect of the affair is that the company Astronomer is now on everyone's lips—a merit that, however, isn't credited to Byron as such.

What happened in Boston was not the first affair that, as soon as it became known, had very serious consequences. In the mid-1280s, the Italian nobleman Giovanni Malatesta caught his wife Francesca da Rimini with his younger stepbrother Paolo and promptly ran them both through with a sword: Coldplay! Dante Alighieri was kind enough to preserve Francesca's memory in the "Divine Comedy" – a great example of Western poetry that adorns the person of Francesca with garlands of myth and casts her identity in the gentle light of legend. Almost 600 years later, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin unfurled the merciless Coldplay canvas. His canvas was made of marble: The Kiss, Rodin's famous sculpture, shows Francesca and Paolo in intimate togetherness. What was considered shameful at the time is now world-famous art, but Francesca and Paolo are forever frozen in adultery.

Francesca, Paolo, Andy, and Kristin—they were all out at the wrong time and caught at the right moment. The cultural appeal of an affair, as everyone should know, traditionally lies in its strict secrecy. Finally, a few verses for Andy Byron as consolation and warning: "We shall no longer walk so late at night, when the heart is in love and the moon shines so bright." The poet who wrote that? Yes, you can scoff, it was Lord Byron.