Simple Passion

by Annie Ernaux

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

abnormal if I had said: “I’m having a passionate love affair.”

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,

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

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

reflected in their mother’s absent stare and silent behavior: at times they mean nothing to her, in the same way that grown-up kittens can mean nothing to a mother cat longing to go on the prowl.

As far as I was concerned, that notion did not enter the relationship; I could experience only absence or presence. I am merely listing the signs of a passion, wavering between “one day” and “every day,” as if this inventory could allow me to grasp the reality of my passion.

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 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.)

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.

Throughout this period, all my thoughts and all my actions involved the repetition of history. I wanted to turn the present back into the past, opening on to happiness.

Yet, when I began to write, I wanted to stay in that age of passion, when all my actions—from the choice of a film to the selection of a lipstick—were channeled towards one person. The past tense used in the first part of the book suggests endless repetition and conveys the belief that “life was better in those days.”

The prospect of rediscovering “life’s little pleasures”—meeting friends, going to the cinema, enjoying a good meal—has become less horrific.

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.