Simple Passion

by Annie Ernaux

It occurred to me that writing should also aim for that—the impression conveyed by sexual intercourse, a feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgment.

We were burning up a capital of desire. What we gained in physical intensity we lost in time.

I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it.

From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.

It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were together making love. And even then I dreaded the moments to come, when he would be gone. I experienced pleasure like a future pain.

I reflected that there was very little difference between this reconstruction and a hallucination, between memory and madness.

I felt that time was no longer taking me anywhere, it only made me grow old.

The man who returned that evening wasn’t the man I was carrying inside me throughout the year when he was here, and when I was writing about him. I shall never see that man again. Yet it is that surreal, almost non-existent last visit that gives my passion its true meaning, which is precisely to be meaningless, and to have been for two years the most violent and unaccountable reality ever.

I discovered what people are capable of, in other words, anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myself turned to them. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world.

When I was a child, luxury was fur coats, evening dresses, and villas by the sea. Later on, I thought it meant leading the life of an intellectual. Now I feel that it is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.