Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about bull-fights. All the good bull-fighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel that is, those with aficion stayed there. … We never talked for very long at a time. It was simply the pleasure of discovering what we each felt. Men would come in from distant towns and before they left Pamplona stop and talk for a few minutes with Montoya about bulls. These men were aficionados. Those who were aficionados could always get rooms even when the hotel was full. Montoya introduced me to some of them. They were always very polite at first, and it amused them very much that I should be an American. Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion. … When they saw that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the should, or a “Buen hombre.” But nearly always there was the actual touching. It seemed as though they wanted to touch you to make it certain.
-The Sun Also Rises To me, an aficion is something that makes you happy without help from anyone else. To me, that’s ice cream and running. (Writing and reading are both too fraught with disappointment to count as an aficion.) I feel very lucky that there are so many people in my life who have aficion; passionate people usually have interesting things to say. The Sun Also Rises also served as a reminder (to me) to revisit this Madonna video.