Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  How blind I was to what I really am, how naive it was of me to hope to overcome the fundamental rift in me, the contradiction that is the very basis of my life! Well, I might as well admit it: there’s a constant ringing in my ears and a pain in my chest. At first I refused to pay any attention to it, but the ringing in my ears is now like an insistent bell. The truth is that I’m a ruined man, that I ought to declare myself a bankrupt. To give myself countenance, to escape, I continued writing for seven hours, like all the others. I even made the most of the extra fifteen minutes of grace granted to the stragglers. That is because my whole life was rising up in my throat again, because I was writing without thinking, straight from the heart to the pen. At the close of this exhausting session, I had some fifty pages to carry away with me. Perhaps, as I now straighten out this narrative, I can manage to see more clearly into my own darkness and to find a way out. PART ONE The Blind Alley ~ 1. THE BLIND ALLEY ~ My father’s breathing, a rapid hissing, punctuated the nighttime silence of our room. The world of my childhood was reassured and protected by this asthmatic breathing that dispelled the terrors of my solitary awakenings. When the moon rose high and plunged its light deep into the narrow blind alley, the anxieties of night stopped at the bars of our window, as their shadows, slowly revolving, cast a pattern of squares on the wall of the room. But I hated to stare at the room that was all sticky with the darkness that seemed to distend the clothes hanging from nails in the wall behind the closed door, that appeared to stifle the mirror of the wardrobe, and then to dissolve itself in a bluish mist by the window. I kept my eyes closed and was soon asleep again. Now, I want to remember all this. My life has known days of innocence when I had only to close my eyes in order not to see. Regularly, at dawn, I was awakened by the muffled and spasmodic rumbling of the garbage carts. Frightened, I would nestle close to my father in the big family bed, with my legs against his belly. He would then place his heavy hand on my head, with a gesture that had become a ritual.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  On my desk there are a thermos flask, a package of sandwiches, cigarettes, and a bottle of ink, as on all the other desks. But as I face these white sheets of paper and long hours that call for an effort, I must admit at last how impossible my whole life has become. The buzzing in my ears has started again these last few days. At first, I tried to ignore it: it was nothing but a slight fatigue that would leave me after the exams. But now it sounds like the incessant ringing of a bell. Come, it’s high time! My chest aches too; to tell the truth, it has always ached, but I would not let it worry me. Now I cannot but admit it: my ears are buzzing and my chest is aching. I might uncork the flask full of such strong coffee and it would bring the dead back to life, and drink a cupful and perhaps even finish this paper. But again I have to admit that I can work only with lots of coffee, while my hands tremble and my heart beats fast. The truth is that I am a wreck. I have wasted too much energy and for too long. I paid a far higher price than the others for my smallest success because I always had to fight under impossible conditions. It is now time to put an end to this disastrous business. I am beaten. In any case, had I been capable of continuing, I did not want to. How could I go on taking seriously this little world of conventions, of arbitrary values, of exams and their little emotions, together with the absurd administrative hierarchies? The sheet of paper before me waits for me to tell the examiners what I think of John Stuart Mill and of Condillac. What do I think? Precisely, today I am incapable of thinking about anything but my own ideas and what I am. I look at my comrades around me. With their pale heads bent over their work and their nervous hands in their tousled hair, they know exactly what they want. They can work themselves into a frenzy over something that is not themselves. What is required of us? That we express the balanced opinions of our examiners and the impersonal ideas of the university concerning John Stuart Mill and Condillac? They would then be able to choose the twenty essays that are most alike because they reflect most slavishly the university’s ideal version. I am no longer able to forget myself and to think of something else. Nothing can distract me now from this basic quest.

• From Bluets (2009)

  134. It calms me to think of blue as the color of death. I have long imagined death’s approach as the swell of a wave—a towering wall of blue. You will drown , the world tells me, has always told me. You will descend into a blue underworld, blue with hungry ghosts, Krishna blue, the blue faces of the ones you loved. They all drowned, too . To take a breath of water: does the thought panic or excite you? If you are in love with red then you slit or shoot. If you are in love with blue you fill your pouch with stones good for sucking and head down to the river. Any river will do. 135. Of course one can have “the blues” and stay alive, at least for a time. “Productive,” even (the perennial consolation!). See, for example, “Lady Sings the Blues”: “She’s got them bad / She feels so sad / Wants the world to know / Just what her blues is all about.” Nonetheless, as Billie Holiday knew, it remains the case that to see blue in deeper and deeper saturation is eventually to move toward darkness. 136. “Drinking when you are depressed is like throwing kerosene on a fire,” I read in another self-help book at the bookstore. What depression ever felt like a fire? I think, shoving the book back on the shelf. 137. It is unclear what Holiday means, exactly, when she sings, “But now the world will know/She’s never gonna sing ’em no more/No more.” What is unclear: whether she is moving on, shutting up, or going to die. Also unclear: the source of her triumphance . 138. But perhaps there is no real mystery here at all. “Life is usually stronger than people’s love for it” (Adam Phillips): this is what Holiday’s voice makes audible. To hear it is to understand why suicide is both so easy and so difficult: to commit it one has to stamp out this native triumphance, either by training oneself, over time, to dehabilitate or disbelieve it (drugs help here), or by force of ambush . 139. “Memory is blue in the head? Heads are easily taken off” (Lorine Niedecker). 140. How to take it off: I could drink every single drop of alcohol in my house, which includes the rest of this beer and a bottle of Maker’s Mark. I could let myself be fucked mercilessly by many strangers at once, as in my first sexual fantasy: I am sent halfway across the world in a cardboard box with a lot of postage on it. The journey is long and rough and invariably involves much jostling by camels. When I arrive, a tribe of men opens the box under a hot desert sun, and out spills my small body. They are all eager to touch it.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Was it a mirage? A dirty yellow jalopy, crudely painted with a red cross, rattled around an elbow in the road; it was the community ambulance! The men yelled, threw themselves forward in an effort to run, and waved their thin arms. In my tired head, another useless question had formed: how had Picchonero arrived so soon? How much time had gone by? I found it unpleasant to feel that I had lost all conception of time. The men surrounded the prehistoric vehicle deliriously; with their stiff hands they touched it and groped for the door handle, found it, and dived inside. They climbed into it with their knees and chests and elbows and heads banging against each other, pushing, squeezing, piling up, disappearing in the dark as fast as possible. This took as long as was necessary for the driver and the guide, who was not Picchonero, to set the brakes, open the doors, leave their seats, and appear smiling and shy. They gazed at the overflowing truck with its wide-open doors, covered with men hanging onto the windows and standing on the step. Unfortunately, they explained, they had precise orders, and first they must... The others, their arms hanging and silent, stared vacantly at their lost hope. “Who is the group leader?” the driver asked timidly. Nobody answered. The redhead was certainly buried in the dark belly of the ambulance. “We’ll come back and fetch you,” he shamefully went on. “The community could find no other transport. We’ll be back as fast as we can.” The driver and his guide hesitated, waited in vain for a reply, and got back into their seats. With great difficulty, the truck turned round, jumped, and slowly started on its way. With its doors open on both sides, it looked like a great beetle, too heavy for its wings, with masses of little fleas on its back. We were once more alone with the war, which was steadily catching up with our torn feet. Now that the bombers had made sure of the silence of their former objectives, they were aiming closer to us on the left. Clouds of thick gray smoke slowly rose and hung in the air, and the whims of the wind brought us the acid smell of bomb explosions.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  When the supervisors with their expressionless faces and ritual gestures deposited the examination papers on the end of the table, I read the little square of yellow paper like the others. Soon silence reigned. Not a breath in the vast hall with its hundreds of students. Each has identified himself with his work, each is alone for the next seven hours. It is then that it dawns on me, with the white paper in front of me, that all this no longer concerns me at all. This time the spring within me is quite broken; my strength and my will power fail me now. I might have stopped before leaving Tunis, or at the customs, or in a railroad station on my way, or at the entrance to the college. But I stopped in the examination room. It really is the end: I shall never be a professor. ~ 6. THE INVENTORY ~ After I had been back for a week, I noticed that I was running a fever, low, but regular and persistent. It was a few tenths of a degree above normal in the mornings, and then rose enough in the evenings to give me a disagreeable impression of heat around my cheekbones. In the dangers and preoccupations of the camp, I had forgotten to worry about my health. Now that I could nurse my toe and my wounded feet, could sleep in a bed and feel all my pains, I realized how wrecked my whole body was. The failure of my naive adventure in search of others brought me back to myself. Besides, the curfew and my illegal position should have been enough. As the Germans came to feel that all was lost, they multiplied their raids. When the bombings were particularly violent, I ran to the trenches of the old cemetery. But the German military police, with their tagged dog collars, were sometimes already in the shelters. It was wiser not to go out at all, and so there was nothing to distract my attention from myself. I could not even think seriously of looking after myself. To be on the safe side and as a mere matter of routine, I went to see Dr. Nunez. He greeted me severely. He had been expecting my visit and knew all about my expedition. He said that he disapproved entirely, medically speaking, at any rate, and my visit confirmed his fears. On purpose, he exaggerated the severity of his tone. When I told him of my temperature, he immediately pushed me into the icy X-ray room. The sound common sense of doctors, which gives them their reputation for wisdom, is barely shaken by the intuition of a move they cannot understand.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  For hours, I would listen to him dreaming about wealth in Argentina and the wonderful life out in the open, on horseback, in boots and sombreros. I did not argue about the war any more. He had included it in his plans, which became more complex. First, we would go to England and join the British forces which were less difficult than the French. He had found out that British R.A.F. pilots were being trained in America. We might do a little fighting, to satisfy me. Afterwards, as the war drew to a close, we could get ourselves demobilized in America. From there, we could get to Argentina. Once again, I was exhausted by the effort to escape from myself. The usual cycle was completed and I was incapable of taking an interest in the world or of coming to a decision. To me, the war was far off and of no importance. I listened to Henry as he spoke with precision and conviction. I knew too well how deceptively rational and clear his dreams could seem. Anyone else, seeing us there, with me so attentive and him so bright-eyed and talkative, would never have guessed that he was only daydreaming. I borrowed some books from the public library and tried to do some studying again. It was my old means of protection against the world and against myself, in fact against anything that happened. At this time the temporary Algiers government announced by proclamation that we were reinstated in the university and that exams were to be held within two months. This forced my decision: perhaps it was wiser to continue my studies and become a professor of philosophy, as I had always so much wanted, and to bother less about others. Unfortunately, this time the way back was full of pitfalls. If I wished and, indeed, was forced to break with the West, could I peacefully keep its values and philosophy and become one of its officials? Actually, I got caught up once more in the fever of preparing for the exams and avoided my self-questioning. But I soon realized how impossible it all was. ~ 8. DEPARTURE ~ It was on the interminable return trip, during the twenty-six hours in the train, that I decided to leave Tunis with Henry. As a matter of fact, I do not quite see what else I might have done, except let myself die here. Every morning, fits of coughing exasperate me and send the blood rushing to my head, like an echo of my father’s spells of asthma. I used to be so full of disgust and pity for this ritual of pain, and here am I already aping him. It is high time for me to leave or to complete my ruin. It was a very tiring night.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  We were still in a group and, without protesting, we lay down by the hedges. I then felt my own weariness, which was no longer muscular but nervous, and which no short pause could cure. Then men said nothing this time and did not joke. When the more impatient ones got up, two men just removed their straps and lay down again. “The grace of God be with us,” they decided. “If we survive, we will continue on our way, but we can go no further now.” The group leader, a little redhead who was silent and tenacious when it came to the execution of an idea though he himself was incapable of ever formulating one, swore copiously at them and at their mothers and grandmothers and said they would not be alive long if they stayed where they were. “It is no use,” said Picchonero, the little shoemaker with feverish eyes and a bloodless face. “In five minutes, their trucks can cover the distance that we take an hour to go.” But the men obeyed, glad to be led by someone. We set forth again, our clogs dragging along the tar-surfaced road, stiff with exhaustion, each body a painful heavy mass that passively obeyed. In my empty head, a last obsessive relic of thought beat to the rhythm of my blood: “I want to get home, I want to get home, I want to get home...” It was like a hard little stone, condensing all my will power, with no possible answer: “I want to get home.” We took the road to the left, Nach Tunis. One man stopped, tore off his shoulder straps, and let his sack fall. Then, without looking back, without a word, he lightly quickened his step. Five others did the same, and the little group soon outstripped us. I had neither the courage nor the weakness to follow their example. In my haversack I had, among other things, an annotated Bible, my diary, and some letters. I would have been ashamed, besides, to leave the long column which still clung together. At one turning we came upon a German antiaircraft battery, camouflaged under palms and reeds. “Arbeiter! Workers.” They asked no more questions, but warned us we were going toward the front. We could now imagine the plan of battle. They were still fighting on the wings of an arc, and the retreat had been ordered in the center. We knew that the Germans shot any civilians found in the battle zone. Whatever the price, and in spite of the Italian danger, we had to turn back. With a quick thought for the six men who had vanished ahead of us, we retraced our steps.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Silence followed the uproar. We were all alive, not quite knowing whether we had been aimed at, but our new hope reviving all our last and most selfish energies. We took to the road again in small and scattered groups, linked only loosely by our ebbing strength. The first group disappeared far ahead, and the last straggled to the rear. Each one wanted to exploit to the full his last chance, and the redhead no longer tried to regroup us. Nor did I have any more suggestions to make. Maybe he was right, and it was better to save a few than lose the lot. I hid my precious papers, some sugar, and a piece of bread in my pockets, and threw away my haversack. The road grew narrower, constrained between tall wall-like hedges of cactus. At the entrance to an Arab farm, we saw two charred and disemboweled mules. We had had nothing to drink since the distant and vague time of our work at the quarries. We ran to the well of the deserted farm, and took turns drinking from a bucket an opaque and salty liquid, the mere sight of which made us drool. Some men lay down in the shade of the narrow shapeless buildings and refused to move any more, so we went on without them. Discussion implies at least a minimum of contact and it had long since died between us. We regretfully left the wretched farm, which still had something human about it, for the wild, hostile countryside where we had no compass to guide us in our wanderings. Outside, horror had taken on the quiet and sinister disguise of a machine. Regular and even flights of bombers came over us in waves, dropped their bombs on the hills, and flew off again. During all this relay race, the machine guns kept quiet and there were no accessory noises. Death, at this stage, seemed to neglect all the smaller means that were at its disposal. I had not tried to eat since our last departure, so I now put a piece of sugar in my mouth, but sucking it was so painful that I soon spat it out.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  This time the spring within me is quite broken; my strength and my will power fail me now. I might have stopped before leaving Tunis, or at the customs, or in a railroad station on my way, or at the entrance to the college. But I stopped in the examination room. It really is the end: I shall never be a professor. ~ 8. DEPARTURE ~ It was on the interminable return trip, during the twenty-six hours in the train, that I decided to leave Tunis with Henry. As a matter of fact, I do not quite see what else I might have done, except let myself die here. Every morning, fits of coughing exasperate me and send the blood rushing to my head, like an echo of my father’s spells of asthma. I used to be so full of disgust and pity for this ritual of pain, and here am I already aping him. It is high time for me to leave or to complete my ruin. It was a very tiring night. The wooden railroad car bumped us about on the seats and against the walls. My companions had shut the door and the window of our compartment. Soon the air became stifling and my temples and neck were sticky with sweat and soot. Once, I almost fell asleep, but the suitcase that was on my knees and on which I rested my arms and head was jerked away. Outside the compartment, the cold made me cough violently, but at least I could think. Once I had thrown up the sponge in the exam, I never entered the college again. But I did not wish to leave Algiers before having set the whole matter straight; after that, I was face to face with myself. If I now remain alive, I’ll never forget this extraordinary meeting and the strange way I came up against myself. So I have progressed from crisis to crisis, each time finding a new equilibrium, though a bit more precariously; still, there was always something left that could be destroyed. This time, the accounts are balanced: at last nothing shields me from myself. I made my break with our blind alley because it was but a childish dream, then with my father and my mother when I grew ashamed of them, with values of our community because they were obsolete, with ambition and the middle-class world because they are unjust and their ideals all questionable, with the city because it still lives in Oriental medievalism and has no love for me, with the West because it lies and is selfish. Each time, a part of me has disintegrated. I thought of death, of leaving the world. But never has the idea of death been so familiar and so present, like a ripe decision.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I returned for a time to my sexual loneliness and to my attempts to imagine one of the neighborhood girls in the nude or to give consistency and life to pin-up photographs. My attempt to escape from my aloneness had only forced me back on myself, all the poorer for the loss of my illusions. How I envied Sitboun, who dreamed at night of the girls he had noticed the day before! But I had reached a stage in my life when I was no longer satisfied with myself. As I got over the bitterness I felt after my first adventure and as my memories of it became blurred, there remained only the ghost of a woman whose pubes or breasts I still tried to recall. Then, driven by a new urge, I returned to the narrow alley of the red-light district. I was no less disappointed, but I was less surprised about it. I realized that this is all there is to physical love and that it always leaves one unassuaged. I did not return to search for rarer pleasures, but for something else which was not to be found. So I stayed away again for a while, but naturally came back again, each time promising myself never to return to the filth and disappointment and bitterness and loss of self-respect I experienced after each visit. Besides it was expensive, and I had to be careful. Thereafter, my sex-life, like all the rest of my life, went from one extreme to the other, from attempts at communion with others to hasty and nauseated retreats into despair. My disappointments were not merely physical, as a result of the hurried and indifferent behavior of the girls. I had not found what I was looking for and had hoped for so long: to make love to a human being. The girls’ faces remained blank and impersonal. One of them smoked, and another gossiped while I had my fun alone. Once, someone came along and banged on the door just as I was reaching the moment, so brief, when a man forgets where he is and with whom. Sometimes, the next customer standing outside would express his impatience, and I would try to take no more notice of it than of the other noises in the street. For some reason, the girl, on one such occasion, lost her temper and started to hurl insults at the waiting man. He replied in kind, and this vile dialogue continued across my body.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  June is a storyteller. She is constantly telling stories about her life that are inconsequential. I tried at first to connect them into a whole, but then I surrendered to her chaos. I didn’t know at the time that, like Albertine’s stories, to Proust, each one was a secret key to some happening in her life which it is impossible to clarify. A lot of these stories are in Henry’s novel. She does not hesitate to repeat herself. She is drugged with her own romances. I stand humbly before this fantastic child and give up my mind. In the hotel last night a baby’s feverish crying kept me awake, and my thinking was like a high-powered machine. It wore me out. In the morning a monstrously ugly femme de chambre came in to open the shutters. A man who had red hair standing in a bush around his face was sweeping the hall carpets. I telephoned Hugo, begging him to come sooner than he had promised. His letters had been soft and sad. But over the telephone he was reasonable. “I’ll come immediately if you are ill.” I said, “Never mind. I’ll come home Thursday. I can’t stay any longer.” Fifteen minutes later he called, now fully aware of my distress, to say he would be here Friday instead of Saturday morning. I was in despair over the sudden and terrifying need of Hugo. It would have led me to commit any act. I sat in bed, shaking. I am definitely ill, I thought. My mind is not altogether in power. I made a tremendous effort to write Hugo a steady, clear letter, to reassure him. I had made the same effort to steady myself when I came here to Switzerland. Hugo understood. He had written to me: “. . . how well I know with what burning intensity you live. You have experienced many lives already, including several you have shared with me—full rich lives from birth to death, and you will just have to have these rest periods in between. “Do you realize what a live force you are, just to speak of you in the abstract? I feel like a machine that has lost its motor. You represent everything that is vital, live, moving, rising, flying, soaring. . . . ” June objects strongly to Henry’s frank sensualism. Hers is so much more intricate. Besides, he represents goodness to her. She clings desperately to it. She is afraid he will be spoiled. All Henry’s instincts are good, not in the nauseating Christian sense but in the simple human sense. Even the ferocity of his writing is not monstrous or intellectual but human. But June is nonhuman. She has only two strong human feelings: her love of Henry and her tremendous selfless generosity. The rest is fantastic, perverse, pitiless. What demoniac accounts she manages to keep, so that Henry and I look with awe on her monstrosity, which enriches

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Stephen hammered loudly: ‘Jamie!’ she called, and then again and again: “ Jamie! Jamie! ’ The young man set his shoulder to a panel, and all the while he pushed he was talking. He lived just underneath, but last night he was out, not returning until nearly six that morning. He had heard that one of the girls had died — the little one — she had always looked fragile. Stephen added her strength to his; the woodwork was damp and rotten with age, the lock suddenly gave and the door swung inwards. Then Stephen saw: ‘ Don’t come here — go back, Mary! ? But Mary followed them into the studio. So neat, so amazingly neat it was for Jamie, she who had al- ways been so untidy, she who had always littered up the place with her large, awkward person and shabby possessions, she who had always been Barbara’s despair . . . Just a drop or two of blood on the floor, just a neat little hole low down in her left side. She must have fited upwards with great foresight and skill ~ and they had not even known that she owned a revolver! THE WELL OF LONELINESS 465 And so Jamie who dared not go home to Beedles for fear of shaming the woman she loved, Jamie who dared not openly mourn lest Barbara’s name be defiled through her mourning, Jamie had dared to go home to God ~ to trust herself to His more perfect mercy, even as Barbara had gone home before her CHAPTER 51 I HE TRAGIC deaths of Barbara and Jamie cast a gloom over A eee one who had known them, but especially over Mary and Stephen. Again and again Stephen blamed herself for having left Jamie on that fatal evening; if she had only insisted upon staying, the tragedy might never have happened, she might somehow have been able to impart to the girl the courage and strength to go on living. But great as the shock undoubtedly was to Stephen, to Mary it was even greater, for together with her very natural grief, was a new and quite unexpected emotion, the emotion of fear. She was suddenly afraid, and now this fear looked out of her eyes and crept into her voice when she spoke of Jamie. ‘ To end in that way, to have killed herself; Stephen, it’s so awful that such things can happen — they were like you and me.’ And then she would go over every sorrowful detail of Barbara’s last illness, every detail of their finding of Jamie’s body. ‘ Did it hurt, do you think, when she shot herself? When you shot that wounded horse at the front, he twitched such a lot, I shall never forget it — and Jamie was all alone that night, there was no one there to help in her pain. It’s all so ghastly; supposing it hurt her!’

• From Bluets (2009)

  88. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book all learn to say: That’s my depression talking. It’s not “me.” 89. As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see. 90. Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill. The tears not only aged my face, they also changed its texture, turned the skin of my cheeks into putty. I recognized this as a rite of decadence, but I did not know how to stop it. 91. Blue-eye , archaic: “a blueness or dark circle around the eye, from weeping or other cause.” 92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. ( Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed? ) 93. “At first glance, it seems strange to think that an innocuous, inborn behavior such as crying could be dysfunctional or symptomatic,” writes one clinical psychologist. But, this psychologist insists, we must face the fact that some crying is simply “maladaptive, dysfunctional, or immature.” 94.—Well then, it is as you please. This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you. 95. But please don’t write again to tell me how you have woken up weeping. I already know how you are in love with your weeping. 96. For a prince of blue is a prince of blue because he keeps “a pet sorrow, a blue-devil familiar, that goes with him everywhere” (Lowell, 1870). This is how a prince of blue becomes a pain devil. 97. And now, I think, we can say: a glass bead may flush the world with color, but it alone makes no necklace. I wanted the necklace. 98. Vincent van Gogh, whose depression, some say, was likely related to temporal lobe epilepsy, famously saw and painted the world in almost unbearably vivid colors. After his nearly unsuccessful attempt to take his life by shooting himself in the gut, when asked why he should not be saved, he famously replied, “The sadness will last forever.” I imagine he was right.

• From Bluets (2009)

  How to take it off: I could drink every single drop of alcohol in my house, which includes the rest of this beer and a bottle of Maker’s Mark. I could let myself be fucked mercilessly by many strangers at once, as in my first sexual fantasy: I am sent halfway across the world in a cardboard box with a lot of postage on it. The journey is long and rough and invariably involves much jostling by camels. When I arrive, a tribe of men opens the box under a hot desert sun, and out spills my small body. They are all eager to touch it. 141. I have also imagined my life ending, or simply evaporating, by being subsumed into a tribe of blue people. I dreamed of these blue people as a child, long before I knew that such people actually existed. Now I know that they do, in the eastern and central Sahara desert, and that they are called Tuareg , which means “abandoned by God.” I also know that many Westerners—including several Western women—have shared in this fantasy. I know that it bears all the marks of an unforgivable exoticism. But the fact remains that I have been dreaming about these blue people for a long time—long before I knew the story of Isabelle Eberhardt, for example, who left Switzerland for North Africa as a young child, cross-dressed as a man her entire life, and eventually got lost among a mystical sect in the desert called the Qadriya before dying in a flash flood in Ain Sefra, her body “carried downstream along with scores of other corpses” and eventually crushed by a beam. In the rubble of this flood was found a partial manuscript of her book, The Oblivion Seekers , a collection one critic has described as “one of the strangest human documents that a woman has given to the world.” Its first story begins: “Long and white, the road twists like a snake toward the far-off blue places, toward the bright edges of the earth.” 142. To seek these far-off blue places is, for Eberhardt, to seek oblivion. And to seek oblivion is, for Eberhardt, to be a smoker of kif. “An open wound,” she describes a den of kif. 143. Near the end of her relatively brief life (she died at forty-four), many were calling Holiday’s voice “ravaged”—by dope, by booze, by abuse, by sorrow. Though no junkie, Joni Mitchell, too, now consistently bears the “ravaged” epithet. “If the health warning isn’t enough to put you off cigarettes, the nicotine-ravaged vocals of the once angelic, now gasping Joni Mitchell should,” one reviewer recently wrote. “Mitchell’s voice is a husky shadow of its former feather-light glory, mirroring how her joyful, playful attitude has dwindled to bitter dissatisfaction.”

• From Bluets (2009)

  For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. ( Can it die? Does it have a heart?) Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it’s orange, that we’re normal. 39. The Encyclopedia does not help. “If normally our perception of color involves ‘false consciousness,’ what is the right way to think of colors?” it asks. “In the case of color, unlike other cases,” it concludes, “false consciousness should be a cause for celebration.” 40. When I talk about color and hope, or color and despair, I am not talking about the red of a stoplight, a periwinkle line on the white felt oval of a pregnancy test, or a black sail strung from a ship’s mast. I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning. 41. On the eve of the millennium, driving through the Valley of the Moon. On the radio a DJ was going through the best albums of the century, and somewhere, I think around number thirty, was Joni Mitchell’s Blue . The DJ played “River,” and said that its greatness lies in the fact that no woman had ever said it so clearly and unapologetically before: I’m so hard to handle, I’m selfish and I’m sad . Progress! I thought. Then came the song’s next line: Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby that I ever had . 42. Sitting in my office before teaching a class on prosody, trying not to think about you, about my having lost you. But how can it be? How can it be? Was I too blue for you. Was I too blue . I look down at my lecture notes: Heártbréak is a spondee . Then I lay my head down on the desk and start to weep.—Why doesn’t this help? 43. Before a faculty meeting, talking again with the expert on guppy menopause. What do biologists make of the question, Does color exist? I ask. Duh, he says. A male guppy looking for a mate doesn’t worry about whether color exists, he says. A male guppy only cares about being orange, in order to attract one. But can it really be said that the guppy cares about being orange? I ask. No, he admits. The male guppy simply is orange. Why orange? I ask. He shrugs. In the face of some questions, he says, biologists can only vacate the field. 44. This particular conversation with the expert on guppy menopause takes place on a day when, later that afternoon, a therapist will say to me, If he hadn’t lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is .

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  They: the young Sicilians, the Arab policeman, the French newspaper owner, our classmates at the lycée, the whole city in fact. And it was true that our native city was as hostile to us as an unnatural mother. We had been disappointed at one blow; it was final and couldn’t be healed. I admired Bissor and often asked myself if his reaction wasn’t the best. For a year I forced myself to go along with him and practice boxing in the same gym. I managed to acquire some skill, but I remained weak because I was undernourished. Nor did I ever manage to overcome the nausea that I experienced whenever I struck an opponent’s eyes, nose, or mouth. I was already suspicious of my body and disgusted whenever it affirmed its presence, for I knew that no amount of animal self-assertion could ever heal the wound my native city had inflicted on me. Later, I began to experience a strange new fear whenever I found myself in the bowel-like maze of the covered bazaar. I would feel a sudden nausea and that I must reach an open space as fast as possible, because otherwise I might knock my head against walls that were too close to me. ~ 7. CHOSEN OUT OF MANY ~ I was expected to attend the lycée, the French high school, at the beginning of the school year that followed my bar mitzvah. This extraordinary happening was the consequence of an unexpected piece of luck. The road was straight and easy for sons of the middle class: first junior high school, then senior high school, then the university or their father’s business. If they branched off somewhere along the line, it was because they wanted to. But I knew nothing of my own future beyond the school certificate. Not that I had no exact dreams or ambitions but, beyond this certificate, all was still shrouded in darkness. I wanted very much to become a physician, after having been to the free dispensary at the hospital where we had waited for hours before being admitted finally into the presence of a doctor as distant and sure of his own authority as God Himself. I had been impressed by the prestige of the nurses, the humility of the poor patients. At home, in our eyes, the “Doctor” remained a magician, still inheriting much of the wonder inspired by a sorcerer and having all of the latter’s assurance. Often, with a hairpin, I gave imaginary injections to Kalla and Poupeia, the neighbors’ daughter, and then bound them up with a handkerchief.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The patient calmed down and I stood there, useless and humiliated, watching what I could not do myself, I mean take one of them in my arms and nurse and comfort him. Soon the others recovered their spirits and decided to cover his stomach with hot ashes and oil, believing that he must be suffering from intestinal trouble. I came out of my dream and protested, trying to explain that what he needed was ice and that they might kill him by treating appendicitis with heat. They would not believe me and insisted on the virtues of their traditional remedy which they had already applied, they said, most successfully. Too energetically, I answered that they had always been wrong, which angered them so that they decided to take no more notice of me. The moment was too grave for their usual show of superficial politeness toward me. I gave up the argument and went back to the tent where the scouts, their curiosity satisfied, had now settled down again. They spared me their irony, but their faces were eloquent and, as the sick man could no longer be heard and was no doubt soothed, they tried to while away the evening with part singing. Gradually the vanity of my presence in the camp dawned on me, as well as an awareness of how simple-minded I had been, so that the decision to escape slowly began to mature. Perhaps the monotony contributed more to this than the constant anxiety and sudden dangers. I kept a diary regularly, and it filled three books, but if I were to try to sum up this period today I would not be able to do it. Naturally, there were the few episodes of sheer horror that I can never forget. The vision, for instance, of a comrade who, stripped to the waist and attached to a wrecked tank, had become delirious in the middle of the night. And the sight too of the two machine gun volleys at night, one of which killed a wretched escaping worker while the other killed poor Basmouth in his own excrement because he had dared to leave his tent during curfew. Then there was also the stupid allied Spitfire attack which, having spared the guards, left two perfectly silent corpses in the middle of the deathly consternation of the landscape; and a few other incidents besides. But on the whole, this period remains a solid and alien block within my memory. Events helped to speed my decision. The Germans were yielding ground every day with their backs to the sea, and the camps accordingly retreated northwards. In two months we moved five times and were obviously becoming useless. Rumor had it, and this was confirmed by discreet information in letters we received, that we were to be shipped to Germany.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The landscape became more and more rugged with eroded purple rocks, thorny vegetation and cactus, and the atmosphere of a silent Western movie. At last the truck entered the bed of a dried-up oued and jogged and bounded over the white stones of the river bed. At the far end of the oued, the camp appeared in the middle of a circle of chalk cliffs, like a big white hole surrounded by red bushes. Above, on the ridges, there were a few meager bushes with tiny mauve blossoms. A long line of men stood waiting by the kitchen, and the cook was filling each bowl in turn like an automaton. There were tents of coarse canvas all around the edge. With difficulty, the truck climbed into the hollow and stopped. The men looked at us and, when they saw we were only a new contingent of workers, took no further notice of us. Dusty, silent, and motionless on the parched earth, they looked like hungry locusts. My companions no longer had the courage even to pretend and were silent. I jumped from the truck and limbered up my legs. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, two men from the line were at one another’s throats, rolling on the ground and hitting out blindly, hindered by their rags. They were brutally and unhurriedly separated by the others while the soldiers looked on indifferently. The degradation of my new companions was so complete that the idea of the job I had set myself gave me anguish. I caught myself swearing inwardly to myself that I would never fight for a bowl of soup, and found that, whether I liked it or not, I was already prepared to run away. Fresh work crews arrived, followed at a distance by soldiers who chattered among themselves. The men were visibly exhausted and never made a move that was useless but took only enough time to lay down their tools, fetch their bowls, and rejoin their line. They looked at us briefly and without curiosity. Those who had already received their portion sat on the ground in groups of two or three to eat. We looked on, in front of our truck, disconcerted. I had come to the work-camp of my own accord, and I fully realized it when I saw that my presence could be of no help to these men. I am not trying to justify myself, I am only relating what I believe I must say. I had been simple enough to think I could help the others, but in fact I could neither break through the massive suspiciousness caused by their suffering, nor get them to accept me. Maybe I lacked love, maybe I was too feeble for such a struggle which was mostly a struggle against myself.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  (But I wonder whether the gravest problems are not less painful than having to face one’s own self.) This was certainly one of the most terrible periods of my life. Again I was forced to choose, and my weariness made the least effort exhausting. But this time the choice would not be personal; it required an urgent, definite, and public solution. When war had been declared, a spontaneous movement had caused all native-born Jews to sign up. At the Liberation, not one of them volunteered. The instinct of human groups is usually sound. The war had taught us our real place in the mind of the West. Each time we had needed the West it had ignored us. The news that now reached us from the rest of the world confirmed this selfishness of the West: the desperate appeals of the Warsaw ghetto, the silence of the West’s religious authorities, and its abandonment of most of the Jewish minorities to the Germans. As soon as the Germans left Tunis, our ghetto decided for itself that the war was over. For me, it could not be so simple. Once I had overcome my rage against Vichy, the numerus clausus, and the Fascist Legion, I began to doubt the treason of France. To accept it would indeed have been unbearable. All my ambitions, my studies, and my life were founded on this choice. How much would I have to uproot in myself now? What would be left me? It was in this dreadful moment that I finally caught a glimpse of my ruin. If I rejected what I was becoming would I be able to return to what I had been? I hung around the deserted recruiting offices without being able to make up my mind. One of my motives was to end this constant brooding and to do anything so as to be done with it. But a new phenomenon appeared in my life: I developed insomnia. Until then, no noise or irritation had been able to provoke this, and I could have been carried around, fast asleep, without being awakened. I now started to have nightmares and it took me so long to fall asleep that, the next day, my features were drawn and my head empty. One night I had such a terrible dream that I awoke in anguish and leaped out of bed. I no longer remember the details, which I was anxious to chase out of my mind, but I still have with me the curious and horrible impression that it left. It was about a replica of myself, dead and stretched out on the floor, while my mother inhumanly forced me, with a cruel hand, to stare in its face. Alive, I still felt that I was dead and that I had to live and accept and put up with my own death. I jumped out of bed and ran to open the window to let some fresh air into the room.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Later we sit in the dim light of the iridescent aquarium, bowed with turmoil. Henry gets up and walks about the room. “I cannot go away, Anaïs. I should be here. I am your husband.” I want to cling to him, to hold him, to imprison him. “If I stay another minute,” he continues, “I will do something mad.” “Go away quickly,” I say. “I can’t bear this.” As we go down the stairs he smells the dinner cooking. I bring his hands to my face. “Stay, Henry, stay.” “What you desire,” said Allendy, “is of lesser value than what you have found.” Because of him, tonight I even understand how John loved me in his own way. I believe in Henry’s love. I believe that even if June wins, Henry will love me forever. What tempts me strongly is to face June with Henry, to let her torture us both, to love her, to win her love and Henry’s. I plan to use the courage Allendy gives me in greater schemes of self-torture and self-destruction. No wonder Henry and I shake our heads over our similarities: we hate happiness. Hugo talks about his session with Allendy. He tells him that love is now like a hunger to him, that he feels the desire to eat me, to bite into me (at last!). And that he has done so. Allendy begins to laugh heartily and asks, “Did she like it?” “It’s strange,” said Hugo, “but she seems to.” Whereupon Allendy laughs even more. And for some queer reason this arouses Hugo’s jealousy of Allendy. He had the impression that Allendy took delight in this talk and would have liked to have a bite at me himself. At this, it is I who laugh madly. Hugo continues seriously, “This psychoanalysis is a tremendous thing, but what a still more terrific thing it must be when the feelings get involved. What if, for instance, Allendy took an interest in you.” Here I get so hysterical that Hugo is almost angry. ‘What do you find so funny about all this?” “Your smartness,” I said. “Psychoanalysis certainly puts new and amusing ideas into your head.” I realize it is nothing but coquetry with Allendy, coquetry and little feeling. He is a man I want to make suffer, I want to make him wander, to give him an adventure! Born of men who sailed the seas, this big healthy man is now imprisoned in his book-lined cave. I like to see him standing at the door of his house, eyes glowing like the blue Mallorcan sea.