An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books.

Beginnings are pregnant with possibilities.

From Pessoa: “Ah, it’s my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me.”

My half brothers and I clustered around her,

planets orbiting our tired star.

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one’s walls, even if for only a

Such a worrywart I am. I miss miracles blooming before my eyes: I concentrate on a fading star and miss the constellation. I overlook dazzling thunderstorms worrying whether I have laundry hanging.

Does reliability reinforce your illusion of control? If so, I wonder if in developed countries (I won’t use the hateful term civilized), the treacherous, illusion-crushing process of aging is more difficult to bear. Am I having an easier time than women my age in London?

Some days are not new-book days.

“Irrational heart”—I love the phrase, read it in Murphy years ago, and it carved itself a prominent place in my memory. I

a specific ritual. I am

In the early pages of his gorgeous novel Sepharad, Antonio Muñoz Molina writes: “Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it’s the people who stayed who can’t remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they’re the ones who

The winter air smells metallic, of bronze.

Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.

hégómi?

As Camus said in The Fall: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.” I made translation my master. I made translation my

My head is like skylight. My heart is like dawn.

Sometimes I think that’s enough, a few moments of ecstasy in a life of Beckett dullness.

Peaks cannot exist without valleys. My translating is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure pleasure. Gabriel

During these moments, I am no longer my usual self, yet I am wholeheartedly myself, body and spirit.

During these moments, I am healed of all wounds.

I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I’m not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can live inside Alice Munro’s skin. But I can’t relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another. I have my writers’ neuroses but not their talents.

Reading a fine book for the first time is as sumptuous as the first sip of orange juice that

breaks the fast in Ramadan.

But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

Memory, memoir, autobiography—lies, lies, all lies.

sure—where the writer says that all we remember from novels are scenes or, more precisely, images. I don’t know if that’s the case, but a number of authors seem to write their novels in one image after another—Michael Ondaatje is probably the best practitioner of the form, as his novels seem to me to be not so much plot as a series of discrete divine images. I still can’t remember who wrote that

I bring this up, however, to mention an image that is seared into my memory—an image by the exquisitely disconsolate W. G. Sebald. He describes a great-uncle Alphonso in the act of painting: “When he was thus engaged he generally wore glasses with gray silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames, so that the landscape appeared through a fine veil that muted its colors, and the weight of the world dissolved before your eyes.” Beautiful. Sometimes I think I look back on my life wearing glasses with gray silk tissue in the frames. If I am to think of what image you’ll retain from reading these paltry pages, I assume it will be my mother’s screaming, the frail body, the position of her hands, the skirl of terror.

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter,” wrote Keats. No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been. No nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed. Hannah cried, moaned, wailed, and didn’t care if

Bruckner’s Symphony no. 3

Marguerite Yourcenar would knock on my door. I haven’t translated her, of course, because she wrote in French. And what French. In 1981 she was the first woman inducted into L’Académie française because of her impeccable language. She would appear to encourage me, to show solidarity, us against the world. I, like you, isolated myself. You in this apartment in this lovely but bitter city of Beirut, I on an island off the coast of Maine. You’re a forsaken, penniless translator who’s able to remain in your home by the grace of your landlord, Fadia, while I am an incredible writer whose girlfriend, heir to the Frick fortune, owns the entire island. I am respected by the world while you’re mocked by it. Yet we have much in common. I had dreams. I would invite Danilo into my home.

Henri Matisse once said, “It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.” I love this quote, love the fact that the most incandescent painter of the twentieth century felt this way. Being different troubled him. Did he genuinely want to paint like everybody else, to be like everybody

I may be able to explain the difference between baroque and rococo, between South American magical realism and its counterparts in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, between Camus’s nihilism and Sartre’s existentialism, between modernism and its post, but don’t ask me to tell you the difference between the Nasserites and the Baathists. I do understand that this neighborhood can’t be Baathist;

No matter where I’ve been or how long I’ve been away, my soul begins to tingle whenever I approach my apartment.

Noah, however, was a son of a bitch of a captain who ran a very tight ship. Only pairs of the best and the brightest were allowed to climb the plank—perpetuate the species, repopulate the planet, and all that Nazi nonsense. Would Noah have allowed a lesbian zebra aboard, an unmarried hedgehog, a limping lemur? Methinks not. Never has my city been welcoming of the unpaired or

morning, jumble and upend it. Tous