Forbidden Notebook

by Alba de Céspedes

It’s strange: our inner life is what counts most for each of us and yet we have to pretend to live it as if we paid no attention to it, with inhuman security.

unreachable. I felt, as I often do during the day, that he draws the strength I envy and admire from the decision not to let anyone reach him. The need to work to earn money, to read the newspaper to follow political events, gives him the privilege of isolating himself, protecting himself; whereas my job is to let myself be devastated.

It seems to me that in life you have to choose a line of conduct, confirm it with yourself and others, and then forget those gestures, those actions, that contradict it. You have to forget them. My mother always says that people with short memories are lucky.

I thought I’d reached the point where conclusions could be drawn about one’s own life. But every experience—even the one that comes from this long questioning of myself in the notebook—teaches me that all life passes in the anguished attempt to draw conclusions and not succeeding. At least for me it’s like that: everything seems, at the same time, good and bad, just and unjust, even transient and eternal.