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Whenever I had needed to, I’d excused myself by arguing that I was a woman.
But don’t try to understand me, just keep me company. I know your hand would drop me, if it knew.
Not forgetting that the error had often become my path. Every time something I was thinking or feeling didn’t work out—was because finally there was a breach, and, if I’d had courage before, I’d have already gone through it. But I’d always been afraid of delirium and error.
He, the future man, would pet us, remotely understanding us, as I remotely would understand myself later, beneath the memory of the memory of the memory already lost of a time of pain, not knowing that our time of pain would pass just as a child is not a static child, it’s a growing being.
If you could know through me, without having to be tortured first, without having to be split by the door of a wardrobe, without having broken your casings of fear that were drying with time into casings of stone, as mine had to be broken under the force of tongs until I reached the tender neutral of myself — if you could know through me . . . then learn from me, who had to be wholly exposed and lose all of my suitcases with their engraved initials. — Guess at me, guess at me because it’s cold, losing the lobster’s casings is cold. Warm me up with your guesses about me, understand me because I
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I know: the two of us were always afraid of my solemnity and of your solemnity. We thought that it was a solemnity of form. And we always disguised what we knew: that living is always a question of life and death, hence the solemnity.
Ah, if I could transmit the memory to you, the memory that’s just now come alive, of what the two of us had lived without being aware of it. Do you want to remember with me? oh, I know it’s hard: but let’s go toward ourselves. Instead of surpassing ourselves. Don’t be afraid now, you’re safe because at least it already happened, unless you see danger in knowing that it happened.
I ate life and was eaten by life.
I was seeing that that was hell: the cruel acceptance of pain, the solemn lack of pity for one’s own destiny, loving the ritual of life more than one’s own self — that was hell, where the one eating the other’s living face was indulging in the joy of pain.
And all that — oh, my horror — all that was happening in the wide heart of indifference. . . . All that losing oneself in a spiraling destiny, and that does not get lost.
The mystery of human destiny is that we are inevitable, but we have the freedom to carry out or not our inevitability: it depends on us to carry out our inevitable destiny.
We are free, and that is hell.
The night is my life, darkness falls, the happy night is my sad life — steal, steal the steed from me because after stealing so much I have even stolen the dawn, and made a premonition from it:
The God, who could never be understood by me except as I understood Him: breaking me like a flower that at birth can barely hold itself up and seems to break.
am I feeling what I am feeling, or am I feeling what I would like to feel? or am I feeling what I might need to feel?
an inexpressive joy, a pleasure that does not know that it is pleasure — a pleasure too delicate for my coarse humanity that had always been made of coarse concepts.
The real hell is that of love. Love is the experience of a danger of greater sin — it is the experience of the mud and the degradation and the worst joy.
What art Thou? and the answer is: Thou art. What do Thou existest? and the answer is: what thou existest. I had the ability to ask the question, but not to hear the answer.
I tremble in fear and adoration of whatever exists.
And if that is hell, it is heaven itself: the choice is mine. I am the one who shall be demonic or angel; if I am demonic, this is hell; if I am angel, this is heaven.
Because tedium is saltless and resembles the thing itself. And I had not been great enough: only the great love monotony.
And I just had not known that I liked tedium because I suffered from it. But in living matter, suffering is not the measure of life: suffering is the fatal by-product and, no matter how sharp, is negligible.
In the end we are so so happy! since there is not just one way of entering into contact with life, there are even negative ways! even painful ones, even almost impossible ones
Ah, hand holding mine, if I hadn’t needed so much of myself to shape my life, I would already have had life!
But I now see what was really happening to me: I had so little faith that I had invented merely the future, I believed so little in whatever exists that I was delaying the present for a promise and for a future.
I am not speaking of the future, I am speaking of a permanent present. And that means that hope does not exist because it is no longer a postponed future, it is today.
(Nostalgia is not for the God we are missing, it is the nostalgia for ourselves who are not enough; we miss our impossible grandeur — my unreachable present is my paradise lost.)
You were the monotony of my eternal love, and I didn’t know it. I had for you the tedium I feel on holidays. What was it? it was like water flowing in a stone
Ah, how I wanted pain then: it would distract me from that great divine void that I had with you.
I don’t want pretty love. I don’t want dusk, I don’t want the well-made face, I don’t want the expressive. I want the inexpressive. I want the inhuman inside the person; no, it isn’t dangerous, since people are human anyway, you don’t have to fight for that: wanting to be human sounds too pretty to me.
Because it seems like heaven, where I cannot even imagine what I would do, since I can only imagine myself thinking and feeling, two attributes of being, and I cannot imagine merely being, and relinquishing the rest. Just being — that would give me an enormous lack of things to do.
When living comes to pass, one wonders: but was that it? And the answer is: that is not only it, that is exactly it.
As there was the moment in which I saw that the roach is the roach of all roaches, so do I want to find in me the woman of all women.
Not everyone manages to fail because it is so laborious, one first must climb painfully until finally reaching high enough to be able to fall — I can only reach the depersonality of muteness if I have first constructed an entire voice.
where pain is not something that happens to us, but what we are.
Persistence is our effort, giving up is the reward. One only reaches it having experienced the power of building, and, despite the taste of power, preferring to give up. Giving up must be a choice. Giving up is the most sacred choice of a life. Giving up is the true human instant. And this alone, is the very glory of my condition. Giving up is a revelation.
Existing demands of me the great sacrifice of not having strength, I give up, and all of a sudden the world fits inside my weak hand.
My life does not have a merely human meaning, it is much greater — so much greater that, as humanity goes, it makes no sense.
Life just is for me, and I don’t understand what I’m saying. And so I adore it.
