Shame

by Annie Ernaux

For the past few days, I have been living with that Sunday in June. When I wrote about it, I could see it “in focus,” with well-defined shapes and colors; I could even hear the voices. Now it has become gray, incoherent and mute, like a movie shown on crypted television without a decoder. The fact that I have put it into writing does not make it any more significant. It remains what it has always been since 1952—something akin to madness and death, to which I have never ceased to compare the other events in my life in order to assess their degree of painfulness, without finding anything that could measure up to it.

The more I explore this world of the past, the more dismayed I am by its coherence and its strength. Yet I am sure I was perfectly happy there and could aspire to nothing better.

What happened that day could not be put into words, in either of the worlds that was mine.