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.

Now I was only time flowing through myself.

I would count the number of times we had made love. I felt that each time something new had been added to our relationship but that somehow this very accumulation of touching and pleasure would eventually draw us apart. We were burning up a capital of desire. What we gained in physical intensity we lost in time.

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. I could even accept the thought of dying providing I had lived this passion through to the very end—without actually def ining “to the very end”—in the same way I could die in a few months’ time after finishing this book.

Children will always refuse to see the truth 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.2

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.

I would only ever be certain of one thing: his desire or lack of desire. The only undeniable truth could be glimpsed by looking at his penis.

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.

I didn’t want to get up. I would see the day stretch ahead of me, with no plans. I felt that time was no longer taking me anywhere, it only made me grow old.

Living in passion or writing: in each case one’s perception of time is fundamentally different.

Yet I was reluctant to do so, postponing the moment when I would open the first page, almost out of superstition, as if Anna Karenina were some esoteric work in which it would be forbidden to turn a particular page on pain of ill fortune.

Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to f ind out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.)

I know full well that I can expect nothing from writing, which, unlike real life, rules out the unexpected.

To go on writing is also a means of delaying the trauma of giving this to others to read. I hadn’t considered this eventuality while I still felt the need to write.

Once I start typing out the text, once it appears before me in public characters, I shall be through with innocence.

I could end the book here and pretend that nothing that goes on in the world or in my life could affect this text. In other words, I could consider it removed from time and ready for publication. However, so long as these pages remain personal and within my reach, as they are today, the act of writing will be open. I feel it is more important to mention certain recent developments than to alter the position of an adjective.

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.

And the fact that all this is gradually slipping away from me, as if it concerned another woman, does not change this one truth: thanks to him, I was able to approach the frontier separating me from others, to the extent of actually believing that I could sometimes cross over it. I measured time differently, with all my body.

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.