The Passion

by Jeanette Winterson

Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.

She had made him possible. In that sense she was his god. Like God, she was neglected.

little by little they put aside the burning summer in their bodies and all they have instead is lust and rage.

every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost for ever. There’s only now.

Dicing from one year to the next with the things you love, what you risk reveals what you value.

Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.

Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.

She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamours for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.

If she were gone for ever these days of mine would not be lit up. Is it because she will return that I take pleasure in being alone?

In this enchanted city all things seem possible. Time stops. Hearts beat. The laws of the real world are suspended. God sits in the rafters and makes fun of the Devil and the Devil pokes Our Lord with his tail. It has always been so. They say the boatmen have webbed feet and a beggar says he saw a young man walk on water. If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.

No. Take the heart first. Then you don’t feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there’s no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It’s the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smouldering village.

Why do all happy memories feel like yesterday though years have passed?

We gamble with the hope of winning, but it’s the thought of what we might lose that excites us.

There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.

I had begun to feel that this city contained only two people who sensed each other and never met. Whenever I went out I hoped and dreaded to see the other. In the faces of strangers I saw one face and in the mirror I saw my own.

When I think of that night, here in this place where I will always be, my hands tremble and my muscles ache. I lose all sense of day or night, I lose all sense of my work, writing this story, trying to convey to you what really happened. Trying not to make up too much. I can think of it by mistake, my eyes blurring the words in front of me, my pen lifting and staying lifted, I can think of it for hours and yet it is always the same moment I think of. Her hair as she bent over me, red with streaks of gold, her hair on my face and chest and looking up at her through her hair. She let it fall over me and I felt I was lying in the long grass, safe.

What a nonsense we make of our hatreds when we can only recognise them in the most obvious circumstances.

I’ve found what it is I want and I can’t have it. If I stayed, I would be staying not out of hope but out of fear. Fear of being alone, of being parted from a woman who simply by her presence makes the rest of my life seem shadows. I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself. Like genius, she is ignorant of what she does.

Do all lovers feel helpless and valiant in the presence of the beloved? Helpless because the need to roll over like a pet dog is never far away. Valiant because you know you would slay a dragon with a pocket knife if you had to.

She’d never be faithful. She’d laugh in my face. I will always be afraid of her body because of the power it has. And in spite of these things when I think of leaving, my chest is full of stones. Infatuation. First love. Lust. My passion can be explained away. But this is sure: whatever she touches, she reveals.

Saintly flesh is soft and white and always hidden from the day. When the whip finds it out, that is the moment of pleasure, the moment when what was hidden is revealed.

No, not in this life. Not now. Passion will not be commanded. It is no genie to grant us three wishes when we let it loose. It commands us and very rarely in the way we would choose.

If I smell her skin, find the mute curves of her nakedness, she will reach in her hand and withdraw my heart like a bird’s egg. I have not had time to cover my heart in barnacles to elude her. If I give in to this passion, my real life, the most solid, the best known, will disappear and I will feed on shadows again like those sad spirits whom Orpheus fled.

That’s why he hates him so much. He disappointed him. Passion does not take disappointment well. What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?

Passion. Obsession. I have known both and I know the dividing line is as thin and cruel as a Venetian knife.

To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free. The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off this body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don’t say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.

We are a lukewarm people and our longing for freedom is our longing for love. If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.

Words like passion and extasy, we learn them but they stay flat on the page. Sometimes we try and turn them over, find out what’s on the other side, and everyone has a story to tell of a woman or a brothel or an opium night or a war. We fear it. We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.

I am still in love with her. Not a day breaks but that I think of her, and when the dogwood turns red in winter I stretch out my hands and imagine her hair. I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making. Her. A person who is not me.

My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else.