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The term probability includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification.
She died the same summer and I forgot about it, as you forget water you drank somewhere when you were thirsty.
I’ve no use for suicide, it doesn’t alter the fact that one has been in the world, and what I wished at that moment was that I had never existed at all!
She found it natural that men (she said) were mentally restricted, and only regretted her own stupidity in thinking each of them (I don’t know how many there had been) an exception.
‘You don’t treat life as form, but as a mere addition sum, hence you have no relationship to time, because you have no relationship to death.’ Life is form in time. Hanna admits that she can’t explain what she means. Life is not matter and cannot be mastered by technology. My mistake with Sabeth lay in repetition. I behaved as though age did not exist, and hence contrary to nature. We cannot do away with age by continuing to add up, by marrying our children.
A pact between women? They simply don’t mention things we shouldn’t understand and treat us like children.
Pines, in the mistral;
For one moment alone I understood Hanna – when she hammered my face with her fists beside the deathbed. Since then I have never understood her.
Valleys in the slanting light of late afternoon, mountainsides covered in shadow, gorges filled with shadow and streaked by white streams, willows in the slanting light, haystacks red in the sun, a flock in a hollow full of scree beyond the edge of the forest – like white maggots!
A trail in the névé, human footprints, it looks like a row of rivets; Sabeth would have compared it to a necklace, bluish, hanging in a wide loop around a white bosom of névé.
The main thing is to stand up to the light, to joy (like our child) in the knowledge that I shall be extinguished in the light over gorse, asphalt and sea, to stand up to time, or rather to eternity in the instant. To be eternal means to have existed.
