Getting Lost

by Annie Ernaux

Most of all, it was a way to save life, save from nothingness the thing that most resembles it.

For me, words set down on paper to capture the thoughts and sensations of a given moment are as irreversible as time—are time itself.

Love and mourning are one and the same for me, in body and in mind.

The longer I live, the more I abandon myself to love.

Desire not exhausted but continually renewed, with greater pain and power.

This need for a man is so terrible, so close to a desire for death, an annihilation of self, how long can it go on . . .

Naturally, there’s very little thinking, or more precisely, thought goes no further than the present: flesh and the Other.

There is an inexhaustible charm to secrecy.

Now, I no longer seek truth in love, but the perfection of a relationship, beauty and pleasure. Avoid saying things that wound, in other words, only say things he will like. Also avoid anything which, though true, would present an unflattering image of me. Truth can only rule in writing, not in life.

The beauty of this whole affair lies in its continual uncertainty.

Love and writing are the only two things in the world that I can bear, the rest is darkness. Tonight I have neither.

It’s obvious that I’ve always invested too much imagination in men. I get lost, my self dissolves.

I see how much time has already passed, and I weep. Only beginnings are truly beautiful.

And then comes the time (I’m there now) when the pain is so all-consuming that moments of happiness are nothing more than future pain; they increase the pain.

I spend my energy, my life, as if there were no tomorrow.

“Where life closes around us, intelligence pierces a way out,” says Proust. At night, there is no intelligence, only life in its magma of contradictions and suffering, with no way out.

There is a time in a love affair when you run—everything still lies ahead, full of hope—and another time when everything tumbles into the past and what lies ahead will never be anything but repetition and decline.

My whole life has been an effort to tear myself away from male desire, in other words, from my own desire.

Knowing is a great strength and also a form of pleasure.

My life is hollowed out by desire and pain. Is that what passion is?

Denmark, squeaky-clean and dispiriting, is like cotton wool inside of which I can no longer feel anything at all.

But how am I to believe that people can love me, become attached to me? It’s as if only my parents could possibly have done so.

I’ve never been able to make a separation between a man’s feelings for me and his social milieu, which surely must influence his feelings. I’ve never believed that romantic sentiment is a force in and of itself. It’s greatly affected by social environments in general.

Nothing about it resembles my story and everything does.

Art as a shortcut.

I live in a state of anesthetized pain. That is, I no longer expect anything better. And as hope is impossible, the pain cannot be an impulse toward a still-conceivable happiness.

I write to be loved, but I don’t want the love of readers.

But all of that is still, always, a mystery to me. It is no proof of love, which naturally can’t be proven.

my own need to do, but only useful things, useful to the world, especially: political writing, social action—hence my desire for commitment (even in love, I commit myself to death), the need for praxis, giving to others.

Objective chance has lit my path with its dazzling light again.

that thing called destiny, which is nothing but a series of acts whereby we press on in the same direction.

It’s not much of a story, just a layer of egocentric suffering.

It starts with a whim, a pure desire for sex, for one night, and ends with blank, speechless pain.

The only way to end things without too much suffering is to make the farewell a ceremony.

I am now in a state of sorrow, not pain. Sorrow about the lack of hope, the work I have to do, and time, which only ages me, with no pleasure in exchange.

As always, I wake to a day with no hope.

To explain a life, you’d also need to have everything that influenced a person, all that they had read; and even then something remains concealed that cannot be exposed.

my mother had to die and I to write about her, to finally “be” her.

My father is class-consciousness, the impossibility of denying one’s origins. The knowledge that this act I couldn’t understand at twelve (but that’s not so, I knew it could be explained) had its foundations: my mother’s aggressiveness, her desire to rise in the world, the absolute dominion she wished to have over everyone.

I’m no longer sure that freedom exists in writing. I even wonder if writing isn’t the domain of greatest alienation, in which the past and the horror of lived experience return. But on the other hand, the result, a book, can function as a means of freedom for others. Evening. The terrible thing is that in the past I looked for a man to “stabilize me,” to have a kind of brotherly love. Now all I want from a man is love, that is, the thing which most resembles writing—the loss of self, the experience of emptiness being filled.

There is this need I have to write something that puts me in danger, like a cellar door that opens and must be entered, come what may.