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The problem is, it’s just not enough to live according to the rules. Sure, you manage to live according to the rules. Sometimes it’s tight, extremely tight, but on the whole you manage it. Your tax papers are up to date. Your bills paid on time. You never go out without your identity card (and the special little wallet for your Visa!). Yet you haven’t any friends.
An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best.
In general I see nobody at the weekends. I stay home, do a bit of tidying. I get gently depressed.
Sometimes breathless conversations take place, touching on the general aspects of life; sometimes, too, a carnal embrace comes about. Sure, you exchange telephone numbers but, generally speaking, you rarely call again. And even when you do call and meet up, disillusionment and disenchantment rapidly take over from the initial enthusiasm. Believe me, I know life; it’s all perfectly cut and dried.
such is life).
adolescence is not only an important period in life, but that it is the only period where one may speak of life in the full sense of the word.
and rare are those who clearly and deliberately renounce loving, even in our own times.
You will never represent, Raphaël, a young girl’s erotic dream. You have to resign yourself to the inevitable; such things are not for you. It’s already too late, in any case. The sexual failure you’ve known since your adolescence, Raphaël, the frustration that has followed you since the age of thirteen, will leave their indelible mark. Even supposing that you might have women in the future – which in all frankness I doubt – this will not be enough; nothing will ever be enough. You will always be an orphan to those adolescent loves you never knew. In you the wound is already deep; it will get
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On Sunday morning I went out for a while in the neighbourhood; I bought some raisin bread. The day was warm but a little sad, as Sundays often are in Paris, especially when one doesn’t believe in God.
Am I a reporter or journalist? It would seem so, since the style of the articles is familiar to me. They are written in that tone of bitter lament dear to the anarchists and surrealists.
But I don’t understand, basically, how people manage to go on living. I get the impression everybody must be unhappy; we live in such a simple world, you understand. There’s a system based on domination, money and fear – a somewhat masculine system, let’s call it Mars; there’s a feminine system based on seduction and sex, Venus let’s say. And that’s it. Is it really possible to live and to believe that there’s nothing else? Along with the late nineteenth-century realists, Maupassant believed there was nothing else; and it drove him completely mad.
men or women - were not in the least deranged; they were simply lacking in love. Their gestures, their attitudes, their dumb show betrayed an excruciating craving for physical contact and caresses; but that wasn’t possible, of course. So they sobbed, emitted cries, lacerated themselves with their nails;
For years I have been walking alongside a phantom who looks like me, and who lives in a theoretical paradise strictly related to the world. I’ve long believed that it was up to me to become one with this phantom. That’s done with.
