Portraits of a Marriage

by Sándor Márai

as I knew it, even without the words, because I did not yet have words for things in life … The right words always come too late and we pay a terrible price for them.

“I don’t believe in tears. Pain is silent and sheds no tears.”

Because it’s not true that suffering purifies people; that we become better, wiser, more understanding in the process. We become cold and indifferent. When, for the first time in our lives, we properly understand our fate, we become almost calm. Calm and extraordinarily, terrifyingly lonely.

Sin is also what we desire but are too weak to do.

I knew right then that it wasn’t I who had decided on a course of action: the action had decided me.

Passionate souls like yours are proud and suffer greatly.

“It’s always a sin when we are not satisfied with what the world freely offers us, when people offer us something of themselves, when we greedily want to rob them of their secrets.

I’m a woman: both criminal and master detective, both saint and spy, everything at once when it comes to the man I love. I’m not ashamed of it.

It remained obstinately silent, with all the defiance of an inanimate object.

Initiated into what? Into the delicate, decadent, exciting, stuffy, superior, hopeless, cold conspiracy that constitutes an entire world, the world of society.

But what is success? Success is willpower, or so it seems: an enormous willpower, which burns everything and everyone that comes into contact with it.

Passion always has a touch of theatricality.

But there are moments in life when we understand that the most unlikely, the most impossible, most incomprehensible things are actually the simplest and closest to hand. Suddenly life’s mechanism is laid bare before us: those we considered important vanish as through a trapdoor and out of the background step figures about whom we know little that is certain but for whom—we suddenly understand—we have been waiting, as they, with their own burden of fate, have been waiting for us, for this

“Once enclosed, our poor wild feelings can stride round and round the cage, roar, grind their teeth, claw at the bars … but in the end they’ll be broken, their fur and teeth will fall out, and eventually they’ll grow melancholy and obedient. That’s quite possible … I’ve seen it happen. That’s the product of intelligence. You can control and tame emotions.

I don’t like dumb shows that go on for decades; I don’t like confrontations with unseen opponents hovering in a state of pale, bloodless tension. If there must be a scene, let there be a good loud scene, complete with blows and corpses, with applause and whistling.

It seems everything in life runs according to some invisible minute hand: one can’t “decide” anything a moment sooner than one is meant to, only once all other matters and the situation itself make the decision for you

As long as you are crying out for vengeance, he is gleefully rubbing his hands together, because vengeance is desire too: vengeance is dependency.

Now you no longer want vengeance, no vengeance at all … and you discover what real vengeance is, the only, perfect form of vengeance, which is that there is nothing you want from him, you wish him no harm but no good either, he cannot hurt you anymore.

When we love someone, we can’t help our hearts beating a little faster every time someone talks about them, or whenever we see them. What I mean is: everything passes, but love does not. It’s just that it no longer has any practical significance.

Most people can neither give nor accept love, because they are cowardly and vain and afraid of failure.

They tamed the wildness in me, the human part, so I should be a proper member of my class and put on a decent show. That may be why I so obstinately, so desperately, craved solitude.

That’s as much as we can hope for in life, that we leave something useful behind us, something people value.

Later I discovered that love, poorly articulated, clumsily demanded, kills more people than poison, car accidents, and lung cancer. People kill each other with love as with some invisible death ray. They want ever more love and demand constant acts of tenderness; they want it all, all to themselves. They want the whole heart; they want to suck the life energy from their surroundings and are as greedy for it as those enormous plants that drain water, scent, and light from other shrubs. Love is a monstrous selfishness.

It’s not about whether something was or was not worth it: sometimes people have to do things just because it is their fate to do so, or because that is the given situation, or because their blood pressure demands it, or because their entire body insists on it. It’s bound to be some combination of all those factors at work … Whatever the case, the result is that they don’t act like cowards, they just go ahead and do it. Because nothing else matters. The rest is theory. So I did it.

Women, strong, instinctive women, and she was one, know precisely what is important or decisive the moment it happens, while men, such as ourselves, are always likely to misunderstand events or explain them away.

Because hope persists for a long time. People are very reluctant to resign themselves to lack of hope, to the thought of being alone; mortally, hopelessly alone.

Later I understood that this was not as extraordinary as you might think. Life arranges everything to perfection when it wants to put on a show.

But you know how it is with reading too … you only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded, so you are willing to argue, to overcome and be overcome, and grow richer by what you have learned, not only in the book, but in life, or by being able to make something of your work.

Because we are not innocents in the eyes of life, and one day we find ourselves on trial. Whether life finds us guilty or not guilty, we ourselves know we are not innocent.

There are moments when any woman turns feral … her very soul screams out in wounded pride and sheer animal passion. Then she calms down, grows resigned, if only because there is nothing she can do.

We can alleviate poverty, we can strive for greater equality, we can put limits on our greed, our profiteering, our rapacity, but we can’t turn a dullard into a genius by education, can’t teach the cloth-eared the heavenly beauties of music, nor can we teach temperance to the overfed.

To hope is to fear what you desire, the things in which you neither trust nor genuinely believe. You don’t place your hopes in what you already have: what is possessed simply exists, as if by default.

Nobody, they feel, has the right to seek satisfaction, peace, and joy as an individual while they, the majority, a great many of them, have agreed to censor their feelings and desires in the interest of the grand sum of censorship—civilization.

But women never really die for a country: they die for a man. Every time.

And now I want to tell you something, in case you didn’t know: love, true love, is always fatal.

Love burns with a fierce, more dangerous flame. One day you discover a desire in yourself to encounter this all-consuming passion. It is when you no longer want to keep anything for yourself, when you don’t want love to offer you a healthier, calmer, more fulfilled kind of life, but you just want to be; you know, to exist in a total sense, even at the cost of perishing in the process. This desire comes late in life: some never feel it, never encounter it. They are too cautious, but I don’t envy them that.

Passion does not celebrate holidays! It’s a dark force that builds and destroys worlds and waits on no answer from those it has touched, nor does it ask them whether they feel good as a result. Frankly, it doesn’t care either way. It gives everything and demands everything: it is that unconditional passion of which the deepest stratum is nothing less than life-and-death. There is no other way of experiencing passion … and how few make it that far!

It is no accident that history has regarded great lovers with the same awe and veneration as heroes, as brave pioneers who have risked all by voluntarily embarking on a hopeless but extraordinary human enterprise.

Because the body remembers, you know, it never forgets. It’s like a sea and a shore that once belonged together.

I have sympathy for every kind of sexual misadventure, for those caught in the terrifying currents of physical desire: I even understand the most extreme, twisted forms of it. Desire speaks to us in a thousand voices. I understand all that. But only unattached people are free to cast themselves into those deep waters. Anything else is deception and treachery, worse than conscious cruelty.

People who feel something for each other can’t live with secrets in their hearts. That’s what cheating means. The rest is almost coincidental

that everything turns against you, and that you’re never free, because you are always captive to the thing you created.

The only people capable of being at peace are people who live in the moment.

There

were moments I was so furious my heart beat in my mouth. I was furious when in love, furious when I had been hurt, furious when I saw injustice, when someone was suffering—sometimes I felt like screaming out in righteous indignation. But they—they stayed quiet and smiled at such moments.

It was precisely because the world outside was falling to pieces that he was so determined to maintain his own internal sense of order. It was a last line of defense against external chaos, a little personal revolt.

We can only rule over you men as long as we can hurt you. While we can carefully feed men with a few tidbits, a little give-and-take of power, then immediately deny them the merest taste of it and watch them shouting and screaming, writing letters, and uttering dire threats, we can relax, because we know the power is still ours. But when men are old it is they who have the power.