A Heart So White (Vintage International)

by Javier Marías

I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to ‘answer’ things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore – often blindly – the huge areas of darkness, and show them better.

Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and thus can be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. (

when they contract matrimony, the contracting parties are, in fact, demanding of each other an act of mutual suppression or obliteration, the suppression of what each of them was and of what each of them fell in love with or perhaps simply perceived as being potentially advantageous, since falling in love doesn’t always happen before marriage, sometimes it happens afterwards and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. It can’t.

Sometimes I have the feeling that nothing that happens happens, because nothing happens without interruption, nothing lasts or endures or is ceaselessly remembered, and even the most monotonous and routine of existences, by its apparent repetitiveness, gradually cancels itself out, negates itself, until nothing is anything and no one is anyone they were before, and the weak wheel of the world is pushed along by forgetful beings who hear and see and know what is not said, never happens, is unknowable and unverifiable.

What takes place is identical to what doesn’t take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us is identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be told. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven’t already been, and that’s why we’re so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost. Or perhaps there never was anything.

most people only move in order to give up their own position in the world and to usurp that of another, and for one reason only, to forget about themselves and to bury what they were, we all at some time grow unutterably weary of being who we are and who we were.

He always gave the impression that he was missing out on something and was painfully aware of it, he was one of those individuals who want to live several lives at once, to be many, not limited to being only themselves: people who are horrified at the idea of unity.

People only get married when they’ve no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn’t bear to lose.

It’s rather that being with someone consists in large measure in thinking out loud, that is, in thinking everything twice rather than once, once with your thoughts and again when you speak, marriage is a narrative institution.

women feel an unalloyed curiosity about things, their minds are investigative, gossipy and fickle, they never imagine or anticipate the nature of the thing about which they know nothing, or what might come to light and what might happen, they don’t know that actions happen singly or that they can be set in train by a single word, they need to try things out, they don’t look ahead, perhaps they really are always ready to know; in principle they’re neither afraid nor distrustful of what might be told to them, they forget that having found something out, everything changes, the skin opens, something tears.

His video will be vile, but I’ll watch it several times anyway, just to get myself used to him, until he doesn’t seem quite so awful and even his defects begin to seem attractive, that’s the one advantage of repetition, it distorts everything and makes it familiar, what repels you in real life you end up finding attractive if you see it often enough on the TV screen.

have a tendency to want to understand everything, everything that people say and everything I hear, even at a distance, even if it’s in one of the innumerable languages I don’t know, even if it’s in an indistinguishable murmur or an imperceptible whisper, even if it would be better that I didn’t understand and what’s said is not intended for my ears, or is said precisely so that I won’t hear it.

It’s strange that words don’t have worse consequences than they do. Or perhaps we just don’t see it, we just think they don’t have any consequences and, in fact, the world’s in a permanent state of disaster because of what we’ve said.

You see life doesn’t depend on events, on what you do, but on what people know about you, what people know you’ve done.

I felt that uncontrollable irritation you feel when you stop loving someone who continues to love you despite everything and won’t give up, we always want everything to end when we choose to end it.