Getting Lost

by Annie Ernaux

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.

But I would rather that he accept (even if he doesn’t understand) that for months, without knowing it, he embodied the principle, wondrous and terrifying, of desire, of death and writing.

That life consists of this accumulation of endeavours, 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.

utter darkness: he doesn’t call and I wait, end of story. And at this moment, unlike Proust, I do not believe it would take very little, just a tiny movement of the will, to pass through suffering, break through this paper hoop and beyond that point be free.

Dans un mois, dans un an, comment souffrirons-nous Seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous. Que le jour recommence et que le jour finisse Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice.

In my personal life these are the years when I’ll have to resist (physical decline) and testify (writing).

Dying of not dying: for the first time I understand the meaning of these words.

I feel how much I loved the world while S was ‘in my life’, as the saying goes. This going back in time doesn’t make me suffer. Maybe I’ve already begun to see things with him the way I did in the beginning: as a beautiful, surprising story, not a painful one. I know those songs will remain linked to him, but in the form to which I’m accustomed, as art: emotion and distance – emotion that is positive because it is distanced.

‘Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.’