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)

  (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.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  There, will he throw off his gentleness and be crazy? Is it always to be the same? One does not meet the match to one’s state of being, one’s phase, one’s mood, never. We are all sitting on seesaws. What Henry is tired of, I am hungry for, with a brand-new, fresh, vigorous hunger. What he wants of me, I am not in the mood to give. What opposition in our own rhythms. Henry, my love, I don’t want to hear any more about angels, souls, love, no more profundities. An hour with Henry. He says, “Anaïs, you overwhelm me. You arouse the strangest sensations. When I left you last time, I adored you.” We sit on the edge of his bed. I put my head on his shoulder. He kisses my hair. Soon we are lying side by side. He has penetrated me, but his penis suddenly ceases to move and becomes soft. I say, smiling, “You didn’t want to fuck today.” He says, “It isn’t that. It’s because I have been thinking a great deal these days about growing old and how one day . . .” “You’re crazy, Henry. Old, at forty! And you, who never think at such moments. Why, you’ll be fucking when you are a hundred.” “This is so humiliating,” says Henry, hurt, bewildered. I can only think for the moment of his humiliation, his fears. “It is natural,” I say. “It happens to women, too, only in women it doesn’t show! They can conceal it. Hasn’t it ever happened to you before?” “Only when I didn’t want my first mistress, Pauline. But I want you desperately. I have a terrible fear of losing you. Yesterday I was worrying like a woman. How long will she love me? Will she get tired of me?” I kiss him. “Now you kiss me as if I were a child, you see.” I observe that he is ashamed of himself. I say and do everything to make everything natural. He imagines he will be impotent from now on. As I comfort him I conceal the beginning of my own fears and my own despair. “Perhaps,” I say, “you feel that you must always fuck me when I come to see you so that I will not be disappointed.” This strikes him as the truest explanation. He accepts it. I myself am against our unnatural meetings. We cannot meet when we want each other. That is bad. I want him more when he is not there. I beg him not to take it seriously. I convince him. He promises to go out that night, to the same play where I must go with some bank people. But in the taxi my own disproportionate fears return. Henry loves me, but not fuckingly, not fuckingly. That same night he came to the play and sat up in the balcony.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I am a Jew who has broken with the Jewish religion and the ghetto, is ignorant of Jewish culture and detests the middle class because it is phony. I am poor but desperately anxious not to be poor, and at the same time, I refuse to take the necessary steps to avoid poverty. But in spite of this interview with the principal, I did not realize how close at hand was utter despair. I went on getting my papers in order for my departure. The momentum of the old machine still carried me ahead. The situation in the city, at this time, was still disturbing. At the victory parade, an onlooker who was pushed around by a policeman had answered too violently. There was much loud talk about the new Rights of Man saved from barbarism, and the man had let himself go too far. But the policeman had been more influenced by racial propaganda, so he fired on the onlooker and killed him. As the victim was a Jew, the murderer was acquitted. The indignant Jews inferred that nothing had changed. The Moslems too, as a matter of fact, for not longer after this, their nationalist leaders were arrested. Some thought that order was being restored. Lastly, the French Constituent Assembly definitely rejected the law on conscription. Things got organized, merchants started going back to business as usual, and the politicians returned to cheating. In short, all was once more in hand. After all, I too had gone back to normal, I believed. I decided to resume my interrupted studies again and even thought I had once more found the rhythm and the pleasure of productive work. The French Revue de Philosophie appeared again in Algiers, the temporary capital, and I sent in my subscription. I bought new notebooks and went back to keeping a diary. Six weeks before the exams, I turned up in Algiers, like every other serious student, to verify my transcripts, sit in on a few lectures, and get inside dope by means of the grapevine. This morning I got up before the alarm clock rang. I washed my face with cold water and bathed my smarting eyes in my cupped hands. When I finished dressing, the window was still dark. I was well ahead of the first streetcar, with its load of sleepy grocers on their way to market. In the examination hall I took the seat that was marked with my name and made the acquaintance of my neighbors. The boy to my left is small and dark with black eyes under heavy brows; his name is Bounin. On my right, my neighbor’s name is Ducamps.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Each one of us has now identified himself with his own task, each is alone for the next seven hours. In that moment, facing my blank sheet of white paper, I suddenly understand that these tasks no longer concern me. The spring that was taut within me is now completely released, my strength and my will power have abandoned me. I am neither surprised nor disappointed. How was I ever able to be interested in these games that now seem so absurdly futile? Today, we are asked the following: “Analyze the influence of Condillac on John Stuart Mill.” I look around me at all my comrades. Their heads bent forward, their faces pale, their hair tangled beneath their nervous fingers, they all know what they want. All of them — the old students whose studies have been delayed by the war, and the younger whose luck has not yet run out — all are jealous of time. To gain time, to waste time. But what have I to lose? There is but one final stake for me to risk, and I have perhaps already lost it. Bounin looks up, with a movement of his chin towards me, his fountain pen still moving, he asks: “How’s it going?” Bounin’s eyes are vague, he is already deep in his subject and he scarcely hears my answer. His lips sketch a smile and he bends his head again. Ducamps is examining the ceiling. He is one of those who pretend to reflect before they begin to write. I, too, appear to be thinking, but I’ll not be working later. For the first time in my life I’m about to waste the time allotted for an exam. Within a few hours, I’ll be wasting a whole year, in fact all of my life. But what have I done with my life up till now? I can no longer play this part that I’ve been acting. No one looks up any more, all these backs are bent in the silent struggle. Now, if I don’t write, I’ll attract the attention given to the defeated or the novice. I’ve allowed my eyes to wander all over the hall, to the painted panels of the ceiling, along the walls lined with books. I’ve counted the panes in the windows, the shelves of the bookcases, the aisles and bays of the hall. No, I’m not a novice and I don’t want them to think that I am. I still have this absurd sense of shame, so I lower my head and pretend to write. I write anything that comes into my head, and the first hour goes by, as always, quite pleasantly. This solace is a vice: this forgetting through writing, which is the only thing that gives me some peace of mind and distracts me from my world. I can no longer think of anything but myself. Perhaps I should begin by closing my own account.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Each one of us has now identified himself with his own task, each is alone for the next seven hours. In that moment, facing my blank sheet of white paper, I suddenly understand that these tasks no longer concern me. The spring that was taut within me is now completely released, my strength and my will power have abandoned me. I am neither surprised nor disappointed. How was I ever able to be interested in these games that now seem so absurdly futile? Today, we are asked the following: “Analyze the influence of Condillac on John Stuart Mill.” I look around me at all my comrades. Their heads bent forward, their faces pale, their hair tangled beneath their nervous fingers, they all know what they want. All of them — the old students whose studies have been delayed by the war, and the younger whose luck has not yet run out — all are jealous of time. To gain time, to waste time. But what have I to lose? There is but one final stake for me to risk, and I have perhaps already lost it. Bounin looks up, with a movement of his chin towards me, his fountain pen still moving, he asks: “How’s it going?” Bounin’s eyes are vague, he is already deep in his subject and he scarcely hears my answer. His lips sketch a smile and he bends his head again. Ducamps is examining the ceiling. He is one of those who pretend to reflect before they begin to write. I, too, appear to be thinking, but I’ll not be working later. For the first time in my life I’m about to waste the time allotted for an exam. Within a few hours, I’ll be wasting a whole year, in fact all of my life. But what have I done with my life up till now? I can no longer play this part that I’ve been acting. No one looks up any more, all these backs are bent in the silent struggle. Now, if I don’t write, I’ll attract the attention given to the defeated or the novice. I’ve allowed my eyes to wander all over the hall, to the painted panels of the ceiling, along the walls lined with books. I’ve counted the panes in the windows, the shelves of the bookcases, the aisles and bays of the hall. No, I’m not a novice and I don’t want them to think that I am. I still have this absurd sense of shame, so I lower my head and pretend to write. I write anything that comes into my head, and the first hour goes by, as always, quite pleasantly. This solace is a vice: this forgetting through writing, which is the only thing that gives me some peace of mind and distracts me from my world. I can no longer think of anything but myself. Perhaps I should begin by closing my own account.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  After that, only silence could help us economize our energies. For a long time we marched to the dull thud of our wooden clogs. When we passed through Pont-du-Fahs in Indian file, the night was already dissolving. The village was deserted and sinister, with great black wounds on the houses where the doors and windows had been torn out. Solitude is more oppressive in places abandoned by men than in the middle of the wildest desert. After the bewildered crowds of the Italian sector, we were, in this deserted village, rather like the survivors of a huge catastrophe which had emptied the world of its inhabitants. We had to walk round great shell craters in the road. At long last, after Pont-du-Fahs, we came to the expected fork in the road. There were two green signposts with black lettering. To the left: Nach Tunis. To the right: Nach Bir-Halima. It was here that the first men let themselves fall into the ditch, weighed down by the bags they had not the courage to unfasten. 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.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  These refusals might well revolt me, but they also gave fresh strength to the arguments of wisdom. I kept telling myself that a medical examination would have exempted me and that my zeal was excessive. Any man who was liable to be conscripted and who happened to have a spot on one of his lungs could permit himself to be rejected with a peaceful conscience. Wasn’t Henry right? Wasn’t my insistence undignified? Had I a right to try to solve the problem individually instead of waiting for a collective decision? It may seem immodest not to mention as well the simple fear I had of the war. Not that I never thought of it. But the idea of death had so often been with me beside my bed, obscurely tempting but rejected, that the anguish of battle could not be much worse. Meanwhile, I wrote also to the Military Commander of the city and waited a long time for his answer, which said that nothing had been planned for people in my category. Finally, after much reasoning I admitted what the masses had immediately felt intuitively. I could only be a victim of this war; never would I be accepted as one of the victors. In the end this side of the question was cleared up completely. A member of the Chamber of Deputies demanded the mobilization of native Africans, but the Algerian Assembly refused. From a distance, we followed the disappointing debate. The heads of our community then proposed, of their own accord, that the Jews be conscripted. That too was refused. Such a collective measure would evidently have meant extending the rights and advantages of servicemen to their families, and that was out of the question. There was no longer any reason to doubt; for the second time, the West had rejected and betrayed us. The first time, I had been able to find an excuse for it: the Vichy government was much criticized by the Western powers. This time, however, there could no longer be any doubt. Some time later it was rumored that one could join the Second Gaullist Armored Division in Tripoli. Apparently, they did not dare send back those who had traveled so far to enlist. But I did not make any further moves. I would never be a Westerner. I rejected the West. Still, my ideas were too confused and my heart too passionately involved in all that happened, so that I could not fully realize my position or draw practical conclusions from it. I had rejected the East and had been rejected by the West. What would I ever become? What was my future? Again, I fell prey to harassing doubts, utterly overwhelmed. At least there were now few air raids, and I could rest better.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  My talk the night before about sincerity, about dependence on one another, about the flow of confidence such as one cannot have even with the being one loves, had hit the mark. Perhaps my desire to preserve the magnificence of those four days with Henry is a wasted effort. Perhaps, like Proust, I am incapable of movement. I choose a point in space and revolve around it, as I revolved for two years around John. Henry’s movement is a constant hammering to draw sparks, unconcerned about the mutilations involved. I later asked him, “When your feeling for June comes back, does it, even for a moment, alter our relationship? Does our connection break? Do your feelings flow back to a source love or flow into two directions?” Henry said it was a double flow. That he had been carrying in his head a letter to June: “I want you back, but you must know that I love Anaïs. You must accept that.” The estrangement between Hugo’s body and mine will drive me mad. His constant caresses are intolerable to me. Up to now I could steel myself, find a tender pleasure in his closeness. But today I might be living with a stranger. I hate it when he sits near me, running his hands up my legs and around my breasts. This morning when he touched me, I jumped away angrily. He was terribly taken aback. I can’t bear his desire. I want to run away. My body is dead to his. What is my life going to be now? How can I go on pretending? My excuses are so futile, so feeble—bad health, bad moods. They are transparent lies. I will hurt him. How I crave my liberty! During our siesta Hugo tried to possess me again. I closed my eyes and let go, but without pleasure. If it is true that this year I have reached new peaks of joy, it is also true that I have never reached such black depths. Tonight I am afraid of myself. I could leave Hugo this minute and become a derelict. I would sell myself, take drugs, die with voluptuous pleasure. I said to Hugo, who was boasting of being a little drunk, “Well, tell me something about yourself that I do not know, tell me something new. You have nothing to confess? And you couldn’t invent something?” He did not get my meaning. Nor did he get my meaning when I jumped away from his caresses. Sweet faith. To be laughed at, made use of. Why aren’t you cleverer, less believing? Why don’t you hit back, why have you no aberrations, no passions, no comedies to play, no cruelty? As I was working today I realized that I had given away to Henry many of my ideas on June and that he is using them. I feel impoverished, and he knows it, because he writes me that he feels like a crook.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I am amazed at not being afraid; but habit gives one courage, and I have actually watched for my self-discovery for a long while: I am dying through having turned back to look at my own self. It is forbidden to see oneself, and I have reached the end of discovering myself. God turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt — is it possible for me to survive my contemplation of myself? I did not kill myself because I remembered the ditch in summer camp where I used to go and weep every afternoon, and because I refuse to allow myself any compromises. I am leaving now with Henry to give what is left of my life its last chance. Here, there’s no solution; whatever my choice, I would have suffered. If the world is everywhere such a tissue of lies and hatred as here, then life is but endless despair. Perhaps I owe it to myself to cross the ocean first. Perhaps elsewhere I will be taken for a man of good will with a simple case history and simple feelings. Perhaps my body and my soul will recover there. If ever I get cured of my tuberculosis and of my life which I should never have known, I will then have all of my life ahead of me. The secret of living must be simple, since all men live. If I die, at least my apprenticeship will have been thorough. With all my heart, I hope what I have learned can be of help to others. Our train reached Tunis at eleven in the morning. The city was full of soldiers of all kinds and all races, and they seemed foreign to me. The unusual and limitless nonchalance of the crowd gave one the erroneous impression of a fair. The merchants had organized their business accordingly, with English inscriptions and banners across the streets and exhibits of the most heterogeneous wares. The soldiers were buying as souvenirs all the junk that had not been sold for years. So it was time for me to get out of this dry rot too.

• From Bluets (2009)

  It is a form of madness, albeit a common one, that we try. 131. “I just don’t feel like you’re trying hard enough ,” one friend says to me. How can I tell her that not trying has become the whole point, the whole plan? 132. That is to say: I have been trying to go limp in the face of my heartache, as another friend says he does in the face of his anxiety. Think of it as an act of civil disobedience , he says. Let the police peel you up . 133. I have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith. 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.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  My mind was detached from my body, which lived on and automatically looked after itself. Evening fell before I expected it. Night imposed silence on the cannon and machine guns and engines all along the hills and within the arc of the front. But this sudden peace seemed to me so false and so heavy that I regretted the daylight. It was wiser to stop, and we also badly needed a little sleep after these past forty hours of being awake, which included twelve hours of shoveling, and twenty-six of forced marching on an empty stomach. We entered a field of ripe wheat which nobody dared pick. We arranged to take turns at standing watch and hid ourselves in the wheat. I was still chewing a thistle stem which was sour in my mouth when the war, for a moment silenced by the night, started again, more cynical and terrible than ever. A magnificent fireworks began: magnesium flares blindingly white, yellow, and then red, like dying stars; straight bright red streaks of machine-gun fire; elegant and clear lines of bullets traced like fugitive neon lights; and scarlet, sinister rugged patches from antiaircraft artillery. Then the noise: after the solemn, promising silence of the flares came the mad disorderly reaction of the inhabitants of the earth to the regular, obstinate sounds of the invisible motors in the sky. The airplanes replied to the nervous coughing of the machine guns with great battering blows that shook the earth. It was a celebration in honor of death. On the other side of the road a tribe of Bedouins rose from the middle of a field like a flight of partridge whose nest has been wrecked by a storm. These fugitives were perfectly silhouetted against the intermittent and richly colored flashes of light, until they disappeared, pursued by their fate, chanting monotonous prayers. This vision taught us a useful lesson: it was best to stay where we were. I dozed, then came my turn to watch, and when I was relieved I dozed off again. I closed my eyes, but for a long time I followed the lights and colors from under my eyelids. Three bombs dropped so close that we were showered with sulphur. At last, as the tired night receded, the war again became wary and silent. We made the best of the truce and marched on. I did not feel rested. Sleep, which had not for a moment been deep, only reduced my weariness to a general torpor; in the same way, dawn veiled the landscape and obliterated the contours of hills and the ragged olive trees, softened the harsh brown earth and the dry green of the cactus hedges. We trudged silently ahead step by step, for centuries, it seemed. I have no recollection of this dead and shapeless time when nothing existed but the monotonous and independent movement of our clogs.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I mumbled that I had very important business, was in a great hurry to be present for the awarding of prizes, for the honor prize; I absolutely had to be there and it was now already five minutes past five. He hadn’t answered me yet when we heard Monsieur Bismuth’s clubfoot at the end of the long passage that led to his den. The pharmacist then opened the little door ahead of me and I saw the druggist coming slowly toward us, his hip swerving out of joint at each step. He saw me too, waved to me to come along, and went back to his chair. It was the last time that I ever went along the tunnel with its walls lined with boxes and bottles from floor to ceiling. With a gesture of his hand Monsieur Bismuth invited me to be seated. It was also the only occasion, I think, when he did not put on a show for me and continue, for a while, to write. As usual, he was the first to speak and, as long as he still spoke, I said nothing; still, he spoke simply and clearly. If his attitude was at all calculated, then it was rather one of indifference. In a carefree manner that seemed to me to be affected, he announced that I was no longer to expect any help from him. It had become impossible for him to continue to bear the expenses of my studies, especially those for higher education. As for me, I was stunned by this decision that allowed no appeal, contradicting as it did all my dreams and everything that had ever seemed certain to me. It was as if I felt a chill, while he continued to speak with poise, in studied tones. Business, he said, was bad, much worse than it had been, and he was the father of two little girls and had to think of their future too. Behind him, hanging on the wall, there was his portrait, the same one I had seen seven years earlier, when I had come for the first time to see him and had left him with the feeling that the whole world lay open ahead of me and that I only needed to deserve it. How ridiculously self-complacent one can be! Fancy hanging one’s own picture on one’s wall! As soon as one looks at all older, everyone notices it. In the past seven years, Monsieur Bismuth had indeed aged a lot. He now spoke, still giving me advice, as I recall, directives for the future.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  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. Anything else would be a luxury. As if my life were on the same pattern as all the others, clear and comfortable and without any mystery or contradiction, I tried to organize it quietly on the same model as any other man. I am poor; so I shall get a lucrative job and forget all my humiliations. I cannot pay for my studies; so I will coach other students and work my way through school, studying only in the evenings. My memory is full of superstitions and Djnouns and strange anxieties; so I vigorously opt for Western culture and try to ignore all that is barbarian. I saw, of course, that I was simplifying a great deal and that I would have to hack my way with an ax; still, I believed that it was only a matter of effort and will power. But my life has again risen like a vomit in my throat; I cannot be simplified. Every event proves this, every move brings me back to myself. Perhaps I would not give up if I still had some strength. I have already proved myself, but I have now come to the end of my tether. Perhaps it is best as it is.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Slowly, painfully, I understood that I had made a mess of my own birth by choosing the wrong city. Bissor was a strong boy, all muscles and big bones, like a ploughhorse. Healthy as a peasant, robust, vigorous, thickset — he was a miracle within the ghetto’s rotten heart. A mop of jungle-wild red hair stressed his primitive appearance. Yet, for all this, he had within him the fears, humiliations, and resentments of all those born and still living in the ghetto. At the age of eleven, he had begun to deliver evening newspapers after school and had thus come to know the city. I was not self-conscious in his presence, and once I even told him about my father’s terrors and hatreds. But he interrupted me at once: “Your father’s right. You don’t yet know what it’s like.” His own father’s store, he explained, had been burned in a pogrom, and his old man had then died of grief. Although Bissor’s schooling was paid for by the community, he worried constantly about his mother and sisters, fearing that they might not be able to support themselves without his help. (He was right about this, for even though he left school before graduating, he was unable to prevent one of his sisters from becoming a prostitute.) He used to describe to me his daily rounds: the distrust and innuendoes, the perfect imperviousness of others. In Bissor, I caught echoes of my father’s despair, but I still refused to accept it. Constantly, I heard him talk of his hatred of the city, of his horror of having been born there, of the impossibility of ever finding normal opportunities there. I was ironical when the city seemed to stir but he would then race home, put up a supply of food, and barricade the doors and windows, terrified by the unpredictable. Other people’s misfortunes could force me to retreat, but could never convince me; they had bungled the situation, I thought, through awkwardness or prejudice. If the same thing happened to me, I was sure I would come out better. But I had to confess I was wrong. Sometimes with Bissor — who was the only one of the lycée boys whose standard of living was not beyond my own means — I went to the movies on Saturdays. More than anything else, it was the way we spent our leisure time that showed up the difference between ourselves and our schoolmates; we used to go to the Kursaal which they considered a dive, having never set dainty foot there.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I bought new notebooks and went back to keeping a diary. Six weeks before the exams, I turned up in Algiers, like every other serious student, to verify my transcripts, sit in on a few lectures, and get inside dope by means of the grapevine. This morning I got up before the alarm clock rang. I washed my face with cold water and bathed my smarting eyes in my cupped hands. When I finished dressing, the window was still dark. I was well ahead of the first streetcar, with its load of sleepy grocers on their way to market. In the examination hall I took the seat that was marked with my name and made the acquaintance of my neighbors. The boy to my left is small and dark with black eyes under heavy brows; his name is Bounin. On my right, my neighbor’s name is Ducamps. 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. ~ 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.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  You very much want a return to the culture and language of the Arabs, but I now belong to Western culture and would be incapable of writing or expressing myself satisfactorily in Arabic. Still, the injustices and refusals of the West...” “But that only makes our task more urgent,” Ben Smaan insisted. “The more time we let pass, the more unlike ourselves we become. We must pull ourselves together and clearly define our program.” I was too shy to add that Moslem hostility would have to be dispelled and that there was also the hostility of the Jews who had been driven behind thick walls by centuries of fear. This reminded me of my never-concluded argument with my father: “They don’t like us,” he would say bitterly. “And do you like them?” “Why should I like people who hate me?” “Well, someone has to start...” My father would shrug his shoulders. I promised Ben Smaan now that I would think all this over. I talked to Bissor about it, hoping that he would come with me, but I only met with an immediate and obstinate refusal. “You don’t know them,” he said. “Ben Smaan represents nothing. Go to the Arab part of town and mix with those blindly fanatical crowds. Then come back and tell me if you still think one can work with them.” He reminded me of his own father’s death and of their shop that had been looted and burned. The whole of Bissor’s face, his hard and energetic jaw and his big and bright hazelnut eyes expressed complete refusal and an incomprehension that was almost despair. “We would only be polite to each other until the day when they will inevitably fall upon us again. I cannot forget it,” he said darkly. Yet it was necessary to forget and to pull down those old walls. I too knew some nasty tales and had even had one or two experiences of my own. One day, in Tarfoune Street, in the middle of a game, a little Jewish boy had caught at a Moslem girl’s earring. The violence of the children’s movements had caused the jewel to split the lobe of her ear. For three days the street had been in an uproar while the Moslems besieged the Jewish home, refusing all offers of a money indemnity and demanding that the little boy be handed over so that his ear could be torn off. Another time, after a quarrel between the local Jewish carpenter and a Moslem customer, the latter, having exhausted all his patience, had thrown the carpenter flat on the floor and tried to saw his throat. The victim had been saved only thanks to the screams of his womenfolk, all crazed with fear.

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  The mournful monotony of Cheri’s existence was tempered by several provoking incidents. There was a visit from Madame Peloux, who thought she was breathing her last when she found Cheri looking as thin as a greyhound, eyes wandering, and mouth tight shut. There was the letter from Edmee: a letter all in the same surprising tone, explaining that she would stay on at Neuilly ‘until further orders’, and had undertaken to pass on to Cheri ‘Madame de la Berche’s best regards’. ... He thought she was laughing at him, did not know what to answer, and ended by throwing away the enigmatic screed; but he did not go to Neuilly. April advanced, leafy, cold, bright, and scenting all Paris with tulips, bunches of hyacinths, pawlonias, and laburnums like dropping-wells of gold. Cheri buried himself all the deeper in austere seclusion. The harassed, ill-treated, angry but well-paid Vicomte Desmond was given his orders: now to protect Cheri from familiar young women and indiscreet young men; now to recruit both sections and form a troop, who ate, drank, and rushed screaming at the top of their voices between Montmartre, the restaurants in the Bois, and the cabarets on the left bank. One night the Pal was alone in her room, smoking opium and bewailing some shocking disloyalty of La Loupiote’s, when her door opened to reveal the young man, with satanic eyebrows tapering towards his temples. He begged for £a glass of really cold water* to allay some secret ardour that had parched his beautiful lips. He showed not the slightest interest in the Pal and the woes she poured out. She pushed towards him the lacquer tray with its pipe: he would accept nothing, and took up his usual position on the mat, to share with her the semi-obscurity in silence. There he stayed till dawn, moving as little as possible, like a man who fears that the least gesture may bring back his pain. At dawn, he questioned the Pal: "Why weren’t you wearing your pearls to-day; you know, the big ones? * and politely took his leave. Walking alone at night was becoming an unconscious habit with him. With rapid lengthy strides he would make off towards some positive but inaccessible goal. Soon after midnight he would escape from Desmond, who discovered him again only towards daybreak, asleep on his hotel bed, flat on his stomach, his head pillowed on his folded arms, in the posture of a fretful child. ‘ Oh, good, he’s here all right,’ Desmond would say with relief. ‘ One can never be sure with such a crackpot.’

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  The Nicene Council was not merely the triumph of a christological formula, but of that conception of Christianity which made it primarily redemption from death and impartation of immortality. The prayers for the dead and to the dead, the festivals of the martyrs and saints, the poetic speculation on heaven and hell and purgatory, the desire for a blessed death with all “the consolations of religion,” the apparatus presented in the sacraments of the Church to attain security from hell and early release from purgatory, the churchyards crowding up to the churches and into them—all these testify to the place which the future world held in the thoughts of ancient and mediæval Christianity. But as the eternal life came to the front in Christian hope, the kingdom of God receded to the background, and with it went much of the social potency of Christianity. The kingdom of God was a social and collective hope and it was for this earth. The eternal life was an individualistic hope, and it was not for this earth. The kingdom of God involved the social transformation of humanity. The hope of eternal life, as it was then held, was the desire to escape from this world and be done with it. The kingdom was a revolutionary idea; eternal life was an ascetic idea. We modern men, too, believe in eternal life, but the asceticism is almost drained out of it. We hold that this life is good and the future life will be still better. We feel that we must live robustly now and do the work God has given us to do, and at death we shall pass to a higher world in which we shall serve him in still higher ways. But in former stages of Christianity the feeling was rather that this is an evil world from which only death can free us: at the best a discipline to prepare us for the heavenly life; at the worst a snare to cheat us of it. The body is a sepulchre; the world a prison; from both the soul hopes to escape. The heaven-born spirit longs for emancipation from the grossness of matter. This dualism of spirit and matter was not derived from the teaching of Jesus. It was in the intellectual atmosphere of the day part of the general spiritual equipment of the times. Platonic and Stoic philosophy taught it. It was the strongest religious ingredient in Gnosticism, in Neo-Platonism, and all the religious movements of that age. It was inevitable that Christianity, both in its theology and its popular religious feelings, should be deeply affected by it. But such a conception of present life and future destiny offered no motive for an ennobling transformation of the present life. Why should Christians labor to make this present life just and beautiful when by its very nature it was sensual and debasing?

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Yet in the widest survey of history Western civilization is now at a decisive point in its development. Will some Gibbon of Mongol race sit by the shore of the Pacific in the year a.d. 3000 and write on the “Decline and Fall of the Christian Empire”? If so, he will probably describe the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the golden age when outwardly life flourished as never before, but when that decay, which resulted in the gradual collapse of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, was already far advanced. Or will the twentieth century mark for the future historian the real adolescence of humanity, the great emancipation from barbarism and from the paralysis of injustice, and the beginning of a progress in the intellectual, social, and moral life of mankind to which all past history has no parallel? It will depend almost wholly on the moral forces which the Christian nations can bring to the fighting line against wrong, and the fighting energy of those moral forces will again depend on the degree to which they are inspired by religious faith and enthusiasm. It is either a revival of social religion or the deluge. -------------- CHAPTER VI THE STAKE OF THE CHURCH IN THE SOCIAL MOVEMENT