Kindle Notes & Highlights
I don’t know then that one day I won’t be seventeen. I don’t know that youth doesn’t last, that it’s only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it’s too late. It’s finished, vanished, lost. There are some around me who can sense it; the adults repeat it constantly but I don’t listen. Their words roll over me but don’t stick. Like water off the feathers of a duck’s back. I’m an idiot. An easygoing idiot.
At seventeen, I don’t have a clear awareness of the situation. At seventeen, I don’t dream of a modern life somewhere out there, in the stars, I just take what’s given to me. I don’t nurse any ambition, nor do I carry around any resentment.
Today, I’d like to slap this seventeen-year-old kid, not because of the good grades but because of his incessant need to please those who would judge him.
“It must have taken great will and determination to have lifted yourself out.” He didn’t say “ambition” or “courage” or “hate.” I told him: “It was my father who wanted it for me. I would have stayed in this childhood, in this cocoon.”
I try to ignore them, to never respond, to manifest a perfect indifference, as though I didn’t hear anything (as though it would have been possible not to). But that only makes it worse: a real heterosexual boy would never allow that kind of thing to be said about him. He would vehemently deny it and beat up the person who gave the insult. To allow it to be said is to confirm it.
Finally because this union crystallized my difference. So I would not resemble the others after all. In this one regard, I would stop being the model child. I wouldn’t follow the pack. Out of instinct, I despised packs. That has never changed.
But I will never change. I will never think: It’s bad, or It would be better to be like everyone else, or I will lie to them so that they’ll accept me. Never. I stick to who I am. In silence, of course, but it’s a proud, stubborn silence.
I feel this desire swarming in my belly and running up my spine. But I have to constantly contain and compress it so that it doesn’t betray me in front of others. Because I’ve already understood that desire is visible.
Difficulty, you can cope with; you can deploy ruses, try to seduce. There is beauty in the hope of conquest. But impossibility, by nature, carries with it a sense of defeat.
He taps on his cigarette to make the ashes fall, but he hasn’t smoked it enough. It’s a gesture intended to convey composure, but it only makes him appear more vulnerable.
I should be able to stay in this state of ecstasy. Or astonishment. Or let myself be overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of it all. But the feeling that prevails the moment he disappears is that of being abandoned.
I discover the pain of waiting, because there is this refusal to admit defeat, to believe that a future where it happens again is possible.
The death of so many of my friends in my youth will aggravate this tendency. Their premature disappearance will further plunge me into depths of sorrow and uncertainty. I will have to learn how to survive them, and perhaps writing is a good means of survival. A way of not forgetting the ones who have disappeared, of continuing a dialogue.
I discover that absence has a consistency, like the dark water of a river, like oil, some kind of sticky dirty liquid that you can struggle and perhaps drown in. It has a thickness like night, an indefinite space with no landmarks, nothing to bang against, where you search for a light, some small glimmer, something to hang on to and guide you. But absence is, first and foremost, silence. A vast, enveloping silence that weighs you down and puts you in a state where any unforeseeable, unidentifiable sound can make you jump.
I smile when he tells me the story. It’s also the first time I’ve smiled at him. He smiles back at me. It seems as intimate to me, as magnetic, as skin against skin.
In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.
It’s suddenly awful. Awful. Whenever it happens it makes you want to weep, run away, die, because Capri has revolved with the earth, revolved toward the forgetting of love.
that. I wonder if it’s cold fathers who make the sensitive sons.
They shake hands in a lazy way, the way you do with close friends with whom you have nothing to prove. Immediately it makes me think of the world I’m excluded from, the friendships he’s developed, all the ordinary days that have nothing to do with me. The friends, the handshakes, crystallize it. I’m from a world that is underground, unique and invisible. Ordinarily this would make me feel happy, but tonight it makes me feel like a fool.
if it isn’t talked about, how can one know that it really exists?
Jealousy, though not an entirely unknown feeling, is nevertheless somewhat foreign to me. I’m not possessive, figuring no one should have exclusive rights to someone else, as if a lover were a piece of property. I respect everyone’s freedom too much (probably because I can’t bear to have mine undermined).
He smiled so that I could take his smile with me.
Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?
Did she perceive that this selflessness was probably a way of forgetting himself, of putting himself to the test, maybe even of hurting himself?
I also know how much of yourself you have to leave behind in order to look like everyone else.
I could be seen as upset, jealous, or even obtuse, and yet I persist in thinking that he put the same stubborn application into this as he did to his work. The same desire to forget himself, to return to the righteous path set out by his mother, the only one permissible. Does he end up believing it himself?
Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash. In the end I gave up on all possibility of a reunion.)
He says: So, your Thomas Spencer, he’s betraying his friend, right? I say: It’s a bit more complicated… In fact, it’s his youth he betrays. He says: It’s the same thing, no?
He is a married father who takes care of a farm in Charente. I am a novelist who spends six months of the year abroad. How could the circles of these two existences have even one point of intersection?
A scheduled meeting absent of all chance can’t help but take on an air of gravitas.
Was he lost in the details of things he thought he’d forgotten? Did he scroll through faces and places, as if he could take them with him?
But the deceased did not grant them the grace of such a letter. He left without relieving them of their bad conscience. Did he want to punish them? Or did he simply hold on to this fundamental truth: that in the end, death is only a matter between you and yourself?
In the word “defection,” too, there is another idea: that his father missed him. And this possibility is absolutely necessary to him.
In the end, he remained hidden all his life. In spite of the great departure, the ambitious effort to forge a new existence, he fell back into all the same traps: shame, the impossibility of sharing a love that endures.
I say “courage,” but it may be something else. Those who have not taken this step, who have not come to terms with themselves, are not necessarily frightened, they are perhaps helpless, disoriented, lost as one is in the middle of a forest that’s too dark or dense or vast.
I just wanted to write to tell you that I have been happy during these months together, that I have never been so happy, and that I already know I will never be so happy again.
