The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

They have become, when I think, not the form into which experience is shaped, but a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk, and away to one side of experience.

Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching out for happiness.

Anna switched off; something inside her went dead, or moved apart from what was happening. She became a shell. She stood there, looking at words like love, friendship, duty, responsibility and knew them to be all lies.

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really really want, if they’re telling the truth.’

This last remark makes her feel diminished and destroyed, as if she does not exist as a woman.

At the moment when she emotionally gives herself to him, his emotions cut off, he loses desire for her. She, hurt and miserable. Turns to another man. But at this point, the first man finds her desirable again.

Of course, emotion is a trap, it delivers you into the hands of society, that’s why people are measuring it out.

It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only…

And there was a triumphant malice in it, directed against men: All right, so you don’t value us?—then we’ll save ourselves against the time when you do again. I ought to have been ashamed of the spite, of the malice, but I was not, there was too much pleasure in it.

I couldn’t think or even move. I was ill. I kept saying to myself: He’s got to go, he’s got to leave here. But I knew I couldn’t ask him to go, so I kept saying to myself: Then you must try to detach yourself.

I couldn’t think, because the man who was being so gentle was the same man who made me ill.

Something strange happens when one writes about oneself. That is, one’s self direct, not one’s self projected. The result is cold, pitiless, judging. Or if not judging, then there’s no life in it—yes, that’s it, it’s lifeless.

It frightens me that when I’m writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn’t live at all if one used it for living.

It was easy to respond to the coldness, because it could not hurt me, like tenderness.

was aware of myself as he saw me, a woman inexplicably in command of events, because she could look back and see a smile, a movement, gestures; hear words, explanations—a woman inside time.

Yet, of the happiness, the normality, the laughter, not a word will be written. In five or ten years’ time, reading this, it will be a record of two people, crazy and cruel.

But time had gone out of me. I lay with the cold weight of this man against me, as if ice lay against me, and I tried to make my flesh warm enough to warm his. But his cold crept into me, so I gently shoved and pushed him under the blankets and we lay under warm fibres and slowly the cold went away and his flesh warmed against mine.

I lay on the bed, happy. Being happy, the joy that filled me then was stronger than all the misery and the madness in the world, or so I felt it. But then happiness began to leak away, and I lay and I thought: What is this thing we need so much? (By we, meaning women.) And what is it worth? I had it with Michael, but it meant nothing to him, for if it did, he wouldn’t have left me. And now I have it with Saul, grabbing at it as if it were a glass of water and I were thirsty. But think about it, and it vanishes. I did not want to think about it. If I did there would be nothing between me and the little dwarf-plant in the pot on the window-sill, between me and the slippery horror of the curtains, or even the crocodile waiting in the reeds. I lay on the bed in the dark, listening to Saul crashing and banging over my head, and I was already betrayed. Because Saul had forgotten the ‘happiness’. By the act of going upstairs, he had put a gulf between himself and happiness.

It is in me, Anna betrayed, Anna unloved, Anna whose happiness is denied, and who says, not: Why do you deny me, but why do you deny life?

‘Don’t you think it’s extraordinary that we are both people whose personalities, whatever that word may mean, are large enough to include all sorts of things, politics and literature and art, but now that we’re mad everything concentrates down to one small thing, that I don’t want you to go off and sleep with someone else, and that you must lie to me about it?’

I always believed I’d be dead by the time I was thirty.’

The people who are oh so willing to be victims are those who’ve given up being cannibals themselves, they’re not tough or ruthless enough for the golden road to maturity and the ever-so-wise shrug. They know they’ve given up. What they are really saying is: I’ve given up, but I’ll be happy to contribute my flesh and blood to you.’

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

The fact is, the real experience can’t be described.

The people who have been there, in the place in themselves where words, patterns, order, dissolve, will know what I mean and the others won’t. But once having been there, there’s a terrible irony, a terrible shrug of the shoulders, and it’s not a question of fighting it, or disowning it, or of right or wrong, but simply knowing it is there, always. It’s a question of bowing to it, so to speak, with a kind of courtesy, as to an ancient enemy: All right, I know you are there, but we have to preserve the forms, don’t we?

‘None of you ask for anything—except everything, but just for so long as you need it.’

‘That will be my epitaph. Here lies Anna Wulf, who was always too intelligent. She let them go.’