An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

A joke that used to make the rounds when I was a child, probably still going strong: the definition of parallel lines in geometry textbooks in Saudi Arabia is two straight lines that never meet unless God in all His glory wills it.

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

In other words, most of us believe we are who we are because of the decisions we’ve made, because of events that shaped us, because of the choices of those around us. We rarely consider that we’re also formed by the decisions we didn’t make, by events that could have happened but didn’t, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

I believe that the choice of a first book, the book that opens your eyes and quickens your soul, is as involuntary as a first crush,

There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.

Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.

“The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.”

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.

When things turn out as you expect more often than not, do you feel more in control of your destiny? Do you take more responsibility for your life?

“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 remained faithful, and that we, in a sense, are deserters.”

But, it would seem, there is no getting around explanations, we are constantly explaining and excusing ourselves; life itself, that inexplicable complex of being and feeling, demands explanations of us, those around us demand explanations, and in the end we ourselves demand explanations of ourselves, until in the end we succeed in annihilating everything around us, ourselves included, or in other words explain ourselves to death.

I considered the Pessoa quote “Whenever I see a dead body, death seems to me a departure. The corpse looks to me like a suit that was left behind. Someone went away and didn’t need to take the one and only outfit he’d worn.”

“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.

Giants of literature, philosophy, and the arts have influenced my life, but what have I done with this life? I remain a speck in a tumultuous universe that has little concern for me. I am no more than dust, a mote—dust to dust. I am a blade of grass upon which the stormtrooper’s boot stomps.

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo. I was not, I was, I am not, I don’t care. It is the most common text found on Roman graves.

No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed.

Flaubert, wrote: “I’ve surrounded the garden of my being with high iron gratings—more imposing than any stone wall—in such a way that I can perfectly see others while perfectly excluding them, keeping them in their place as others.”

We postpone the unbreathable darkness that weighs us down.

I like men and women who don’t fit well in the dominant culture, or, as Álvaro de Campos calls them, strangers in this place as in every other, accidental in life as in the soul. I like outsiders, phantoms wandering the cobwebbed halls of the doomed castle where life must be lived.

I wish I’d listened to Chekhov, or had read him then: “If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.”

We were two solitudes benefiting from a grace that was continuously reinvigorated in each other’s presence, two solitudes who nourished each other.

I am inoffensiveness incarnate. I don’t expect people to love me, like me, or feel anything at all toward me. I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies. I’m not suggesting that I’m congenitally shy, or that I’m a wallflower whose deepest desire is to bloom into a scandalously fragrant tiger lily, just that I try to live without interfering in the lives of others because I have no wish for them to interfere in mine.

At the heart of most antagonisms are irreconcilable similarities. Hundred-year wars were fought over whether Jesus was human in divine form or divine in human form. Belief is murderous.