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In short, the state of extreme precarity to which I had been accustomed up to this point, the state of permanent although latent terror that had characterised my existence until then, prevented me from believing my current situation was anything other than provisional, and as my desire increased to stay in the place forever, to remain at the mercy of the weather on the edge of the forest, so did my conviction that something, yes, something would intervene, something terrible would happen.
It might be said that the lack of interest I showed in the substance of my work represented a failure of imagination, even an act of cowardice. It’s true, I thought, pausing the audio, that imagination may be a moral faculty, as some writers have maintained, but how to understand its workings?
In spite of all this, all these efforts, I felt radiating from the landscape, surely as ever now, the anger of the townspeople, who after all could not help but think historically, and who, having been in a sense exiled from the modern world to their own home town, a town like any other, whose people had behaved like those in any other, who thus understood the need for roots, whose continued existence depended on this understanding, depended in fact on the pact of silence, on groping, blindly, for the future, saw me as nothing more than a stranger of a fixed, old age, who had appeared out of
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Every single one of us on this ruined earth exhibited a perfect obedience to our local forces of gravity, daily choosing the path of least resistance, which while entirely and understandably human was at the same time the most barbaric, the most abominable course of action. So, listen. I am not blameless. I played my part.
My presence violated some crucial and unspoken rule, which I thought now had to do with narrative, the right of a people to preserve the stories they told about themselves and their own history. My silence was a reproach to them, something pressing at the edges of their consciousness, a terrible knowledge they did not want to own and which I made them look at day after day. In silence, yes, for words have more than once led us away from truth.
So here it all was at last. I had come to this place, whence my ancestors had fled, out of what I recognised at last as an unkillable longing for self-annihilation, no more than I felt I deserved and, moreover, what I felt had been meant for me, the wayward child of a people whose only native merit was that they had survived.
And here I was, meeting history at last, proof that my deference, anyone’s deference, was the surest and swiftest route to one’s own eradication. It would be total.
References Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1 1915–1919, 1977. The Hogarth Press; Malone, Patricia. Fitzgerald, Penelope. Offshore, 1979. HarperCollins; de Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech, 2004. Penguin. Sontag, Susan. As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980, 2012. Penguin. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, 2002. Routledge. NDiaye, Marie. Ladivine, trans. Jordan Stump, 2017. MacLehose. Whitman, Walt. ‘Song of Myself’, Leaves of Grass, 2008. Oxford World’s Classics. de
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