The Years

by Annie Ernaux

other people’s memories gave us a place in the world.

We had time to desire things,

No one talked about concentration camps, except incidentally, to say that someone had lost his or her parents at Buchenwald. Sorrowful silence would follow. It had entered the realm of private misfortune.

Mothering and the life of the mind seem incompatible.

The profusion of things concealed the scarcity of ideas and the erosion of beliefs.

At some point we had missed something, but we didn’t know exactly when – or perhaps we’d just let it happen.

Identity, which until then had meant nothing but a card in one’s wallet with a photo glued onto it, became an overriding concern. No one knew exactly what it entailed. Whatever the case, it was something you needed to have, rediscover, assume, assert, express – a supreme and precious commodity. There were women in the world who were veiled from head to toe.

‘Would I like to be there now?’ She wants to say no, but she knows the question is meaningless, that no question related to things of the past has meaning.

We had the melancholy feeling of being unable to change anything about whatever it was that was sweeping us away.

Between what is yet to come and what is, consciousness is empty for a moment.

We made our way around a world of objects without subjects.

We were mutating. We didn’t know what our new shape would be. The moon, when we looked up at night, shone fixedly on billions of people, a world whose vastness and teeming activity we could feel inside. Consciousness stretched across the total space of the planet towards other galaxies. The infinite ceased to be imaginary. That is why it seemed inconceivable that one day we would die.

What matters to her, on the contrary, is to seize this time that comprises her life on Earth at a given period, the time that has coursed through her, the world she has recorded merely by living.

To save something from the time where we will never be again.