Getting Lost

by Annie Ernaux

The only place where I truly wrote was in the journal I had kept, on and off, since adolescence. It was a way of enduring the wait until we saw each other again, of heightening the pleasure by recording the words and acts of passion. 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.

I commit the same errors as in the past but they are no longer errors. There is only beauty, passion, desire.

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

Then my thoughts of death are replaced by thoughts of writing, the idea that I could write about “this person” and our meetings. And I understand that desire, writing and death have always been interchangeable for me.

I have too much time to think of passion, that is my misfortune. No absolutely mandatory tasks are imposed on me from outside. Freedom makes me prone to passion, so very occupying.

I haven’t changed, I’m still that girl who believes in happiness, who waits and suffers.

Admit it: I’ve never wanted anything but love. And literature. I only wrote to fill the void, to give myself a way to tell and endure the memory of ’58, the abortion, the parents’ love—everything that was a story of flesh and love.

That life consists of this accumulation of endeavors, bland and burdensome actions, punctuated only occasionally by moments of intensity, outside of time, is horrifying. 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.

What I feel now is a wrenching sensation, a sense of exclusion, the desire for death. At eighteen, I ate to compensate. At forty-eight, I know there is no possible compensation.

Awareness of the pain which this will represent, and already does. And the horror of writing an article I agreed to do for a man who no longer even calls me. My situation is as crazy as it always is when it comes to men.

My books have always been the truest manifestation of my personality, without my knowing it. How oppressive that marriage was.

Men and writing—a vicious circle.

I sometimes think that we’re mysteriously linked to other beings and that their death produces “waves.”

I can’t say that men are my perdition, it’s my own desire that gets me lost—my submission to (or quest for) something terrible which I don’t understand, born in the union with another body and no sooner gone.

Do I live differently because I write? Yes, I think so, even in the depths of pain. But not always: that’s the whole drama.

Continued existence is atrocious.

To lose a man is to age several years in one fell swoop, grow older by all the time that did not pass when he was there, and the imagined years to come.

The happiness of S de Beauvoir’s diary makes me so envious. Rereading my own fills me with horror.