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.

After that passage, the rest of the book returned to being what everything else had been to me for a whole year—a means of filling in time between two meetings.

when I knew that nothing in my life (having children, passing exams, traveling to faraway countries) had ever meant as much to me as lying in bed with that man in the middle of the afternoon.

When I went into the kitchen to get some ice, I would look up at the clock hanging above the door: “only two more hours,” “only one more hour,” or “in one hour I’ll be here and he’ll be gone.” Astonished, I asked myself: “Where is the present?”

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

As in the past, when the longer I waited after taking an exam the more I became convinced I had failed, so now, as the days went by without him ringing, I was certain he had left me.

Quite often I felt I was living out this passion in the same way I would have written a book: the same determination to get every single scene right, the same minute attention to detail.

Yet when I was among other women, at the supermarket checkout or at the bank, I wondered whether they too were wrapped up in a man. If they weren’t, how could they go on living this way—that is to say, judging by my previous standards, with nothing else to wait for but the weekend, a meal out, the gym class, or the children’s school results: things for which I now felt aversion or indifference.

But once the excitement of sharing our secrets was over, I resented having let myself go, if only a little.

in the same way I had never mentioned boyfriends or lovers to my parents in the past. Probably because I feared their judgment.

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

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.

I felt I had every right to reject the things that prevented me from luxuriating in the sensations and fantasies of my own passion.

(It is a mistake therefore to compare someone writing about his own life to an exhibitionist, since the latter has only one desire: to show himself and to be seen at the same time.)

I experienced pleasure like a future pain.

I was astonished to be accosted by men, could they not see him silhouetted inside my own body?—were

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

I wondered why it wasn’t possible to slip into that particular day or moment as easily as one slips into another room. In my dreams too was the desire to reverse time.

There is one difference, though: these pages will always mean something to me, to others too maybe, whereas the bathrobe—which matters only to me—will lose all significance one day and will be added to a bundle of rags. By writing this, I may also be wanting to save the bathrobe from oblivion.)

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.