An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

Yeats once said, “The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.”

Remembering is the malignancy that feasts on my now.

In one of her books, Helen Garner says that all women over sixty instinctively learn to pass by a mirror without looking.

Fernando Vallejo: “the torment of Hell is noise.” That night Fadia was the inferno of my soul.

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter,” wrote Keats.

“The healthy flee from the ill,” wrote Kafka in a letter to Milena Jesenská, his unrequited love, “but the ill also flee from the healthy.”

Henri Matisse once said, “It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.”

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Mark Twain

Joseph Roth ends Flight Without End with the sentence: “No one in the whole world was as superfluous as he.” I beg to differ. No one in the whole world is as superfluous as I.