Loneliness

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)

  Philology could explain away what changes the name had undergone, and my friend Sitboun, the star Latin student, backed me up and even discovered that the patron of a Latin poet had had a similar name. But philology is a fragile science, and the past is much too far away. Could I be descended from a Berber tribe when the Berbers themselves failed to recognize me as one of their own? I was Jewish, not Moslem; a townsman, not a highlander. And even if I had borne the painter’s name, I would not have been acknowledged by the Italians. No, I’m African, not European. In the long run, I would always be forced to return to Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, a native in a colonial country, a Jew in an anti-Semitic universe, an African in a world dominated by Europe. Had I believed in signs, might I not have said that my name holds all the meaning of life? How is it possible to harmonize so many discords in something as smooth as the sound of a flute? My native city is after my own image. Through Tarfoune Street, our alley led to the Alliance School; and between home and the schoolyard, the atmosphere remained familiar, all of a piece. We were among Jews of the same class, and we had no painful awareness of our situation, no pretenses. At school, we persisted in speaking our own dialect despite the director’s posters which demanded French. Sometimes I crossed a Moslem quarter as if I were fording a river. It was not until I began attending the lycée that I really became acquainted with the city. Until then, I had believed that, by some special privilege, the doors of the world were being opened to me and that I need only walk through them to be greeted with joy. But I discovered I was doomed forever to be an outsider in my own native city. And one’s home town can no more be replaced than one’s mother. A man may travel, marvel at the world, change, become a stranger to his relatives and friends, but he will always retain within him the hard kernel of his awareness of belonging to some nameless village. Defeated, blind, his imagination will bring him back to that landmark, for his hands and feet know its contours and his nerves are wonderfully attuned to it.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  This is a difficult concept for many people to understand. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the most common response to distress is to seek out people we like and trust to help us and give us the courage to go on. We may also calm down by engaging in a physical activity like biking or going to the gym. We start learning these ways of regulating our feelings from the first moment someone feeds us when we’re hungry, covers us when we’re cold, or rocks us when we’re hurt or scared. But if no one has ever looked at you with loving eyes or broken out in a smile when she sees you; if no one has rushed to help you (but instead said, “Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about”), then you need to discover other ways of taking care of yourself. You are likely to experiment with anything—drugs, alcohol, binge eating, or cutting—that offers some kind of relief. While Sherry dutifully came to every appointment and answered my questions with great sincerity, I did not feel we were making the sort of vital connection that is necessary for therapy to work. Struck by how frozen and uptight she was, I suggested that she see Liz, a massage therapist I had worked with previously. During their first meeting Liz positioned Sherry on the massage table, then moved to the end of the table and gently held Sherry’s feet. Lying there with her eyes closed, Sherry suddenly yelled in a panic: “Where are you?” Somehow Sherry had lost track of Liz, even though Liz was right there, with her hands on Sherry’s feet. Sherry was one of the first patients who taught me about the extreme disconnection from the body that so many people with histories of trauma and neglect experience. I discovered that my professional training, with its focus on understanding and insight, had largely ignored the relevance of the living, breathing body, the foundation of our selves. Sherry knew that picking her skin was a destructive thing to do and that it was related to her mother’s neglect, but understanding the source of the impulse made no difference in helping her control it. Losing Your BodyOnce I was alerted to this, I was amazed to discover how many of my patients told me they could not feel whole areas of their bodies. Sometimes I’d ask them to close their eyes and tell me what I had put into their outstretched hands. Whether it was a car key, a quarter, or a can opener, they often could not even guess what they were holding—their sensory perceptions simply weren’t working.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Fortunately, my thick African skin never allows me to blush. That day Bouli went down several grades in the esteem and friendship that I had begun to feel for him. I saw clearly that my cutting myself off entirely from my own original background did not necessarily allow me to enter any other group. Just as I sat on the fence between two civilizations, so would I now find myself between two classes; and I realized that, in trying to sit on several chairs, one generally lands on the floor. It was then that I discovered a terrible and marvelous secret which might perhaps make my loneliness bearable. To unburden myself of the weight of the world, I began to put everything on paper, and that is how I began to write and to experience the wonderful pleasure of mastering a whole life by recreating it. Of course, this power was as fatal as it was redeeming. To describe people, I had to be an outsider and I could no longer be a part of the world I contemplated. Just as one ceases to live while one watches a play, so did I cease to live and now merely wrote. For my loneliness, it was a balm, but my new loneliness became deeper too because I was more conscious of it and accepted it. In any gathering, I found myself with my back to the wall, an outsider in every respect, alien to the joys of the others as well as to their sorrows. This was a bitter experience, but I still had too much hope to be afraid of my lucid detachment. I was, in fact, arrogantly delighted by its novelty. Thus began my hand-to-hand struggle with language, if only because my pronunciation of the French r and of the nasals was wrong. Dimly, I felt that I would penetrate into the soul of this civilization by mastering its language. I wrote without pause and was never satisfied because I saw that I nearly always worked on the skin of things and failed to reach the flesh. I sometimes asked myself riddles: what is the right word for such and such a thing? It seemed to me that objects would remain foreign to me until I was able to name them correctly. So I often sought a particular word for a long while, questioning everyone around me. When I had found the word, I would repeat it over and over in a loud voice, like an incantation. I had grasped the “thing” and could invoke it at will: a part of the world was subjected to me.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety. No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities. You don’t need a history of trauma to feel self-conscious and even panicked at a party with strangers—but trauma can turn the whole world into a gathering of aliens. Many traumatized people find themselves chronically out of sync with the people around them. Some find comfort in groups where they can replay their combat experiences, rape, or torture with others who have similar backgrounds or experiences. Focusing on a shared history of trauma and victimization alleviates their searing sense of isolation, but usually at the price of having to deny their individual differences: Members can belong only if they conform to the common code. Isolating oneself into a narrowly defined victim group promotes a view of others as irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst, which eventually only leads to further alienation. Gangs, extremist political parties, and religious cults may provide solace, but they rarely foster the mental flexibility needed to be fully open to what life has to offer and as such cannot liberate their members from their traumas. Well-functioning people are able to accept individual differences and acknowledge the humanity of others. In the past two decades it has become widely recognized that when adults or children are too skittish or shut down to derive comfort from human beings, relationships with other mammals can help. Dogs and horses and even dolphins offer less complicated companionship while providing the necessary sense of safety. Dogs and horses, in particular, are now extensively used to treat some groups of trauma patients.[12] Three Levels of SafetyAfter trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system that has an altered perception of risk and safety. Porges coined the word “neuroception” to describe the capacity to evaluate relative danger and safety in one’s environment. When we try to help people with faulty neuroception, the great challenge is finding ways to reset their physiology, so that their survival mechanisms stop working against them. This means helping them to respond appropriately to danger but, even more, to recover the capacity to experience safety, relaxation, and true reciprocity.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  He calculated the price of such a vacation in the mountains if one had to pay for it. The total amount was too big for us to be able to refuse, which would be sheer waste. He probably reckoned also how much he would save while I was away. Anyhow, he decided that I could go there, and my mother, having nothing more to say, began to prepare my kit. It was all quite expensive: I was expected to take with me a number of things we didn’t own, a toothbrush, tooth paste, pajamas, and other items of which we had only a single sample for the whole family: a comb, a towel, a shoeshine kit. The whole adventure began very badly. It was the first time in my life that I was going away so far and for so long from my family and the blind alley. At the collecting point, I found none of my classmates. We were alone in a crowd of Europeans who were waiting in the shade of the trees and joyously shouting remarks from group to group. The loneliness of my parents, silent and scared, moved me even more deeply than my own. I was seeing them, for the first time, uneasy and ashamed, with all their prestige left behind them in our blind alley. They spoke in muffled tones, probably ashamed of their dialect, which, to me, now seemed vulgar and out of place. As a precaution, we had been asked to turn up much too early and now we had to wait for quite a while. The last cool morning breeze vanished and a humid heat began to weigh on us while the flies buzzed ever more insistently. People who had to go in the sunlight ran from one patch of shade to the next. My father no longer uttered a word. I felt that he was exasperated by weariness, heat, the flies, and a sense of alienation. My mother’s face betrayed, by its softness, that she was on the verge of tears, and her lips were beginning to relax when, at long last, the signal for our departure came. We were then loaded in closed military trucks. I found myself cornered at the back of a truck, no longer able to see my parents for a last farewell. Later, I often experienced this strange feeling of being quite close to them and at the same time kept irremediably apart from them. Only then did the tears at last come to my eyes. The trip was very unpleasant. We had to stand for five hours, our fifty breaths flowing together as we almost stifled beneath the painted tarpaulin of the truck.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  When I first encountered patients like Marilyn, I used to challenge their thinking and try to help them see the world in a more positive, flexible way. One day a woman named Kathy set me straight. A group member had arrived late to a session because her car had broken down, and Kathy immediately blamed herself: “I saw how rickety your car was last week; I knew I should have offered you a ride.” Her self-criticism escalated to the point that, only a few minutes later, she was taking responsibility for her sexual abuse: “I brought it on myself: I was seven years old and I loved my daddy. I wanted him to love me, and I did what he wanted me to do. It was my own fault.” When I intervened to reassure her, saying, “Come on, you were just a little girl—it was your father’s responsibility to maintain the boundaries,” Kathy turned toward me. “You know, Bessel,” she said, “I know how important it is for you to be a good therapist, so when you make stupid comments like that, I usually thank you profusely. After all, I am an incest survivor—I was trained to take care of the needs of grown-up, insecure men. But after two years I trust you enough to tell you that those comments make me feel terrible. Yes, it’s true; I instinctively blame myself for everything bad that happens to the people around me. I know that isn’t rational, and I feel really dumb for feeling this way, but I do. When you try to talk me into being more reasonable I only feel even more lonely and isolated—and it confirms the feeling that nobody in the whole world will ever understand what it feels like to be me.” I genuinely thanked her for her feedback, and I’ve tried ever since not to tell my patients that they should not feel the way they do. Kathy taught me that my responsibility goes much deeper: I have to help them reconstruct their inner map of the world. As I discussed in the previous chapter, attachment researchers have shown that our earliest caregivers don’t only feed us, dress us, and comfort us when we are upset; they shape the way our rapidly growing brain perceives reality. Our interactions with our caregivers convey what is safe and what is dangerous: whom we can count on and who will let us down; what we need to do to get our needs met. This information is embodied in the warp and woof of our brain circuitry and forms the template of how we think of ourselves and the world around us. These inner maps are remarkably stable across time.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  “My marriage is slowly falling apart—my husband came to represent the heartless laughing people [the surgical team] who hurt me. I exist in a dual state. A pervasive numbness covers me with a blanket; and yet the touch of a small child pulls me back to the world. For a moment, I am present and a part of life, not just an observer. “Interestingly, I function very well at work, and I am constantly given positive feedback. Life proceeds with its own sense of falsity. “There is a strangeness, bizarreness to this dual existence. I tire of it. Yet I cannot give up on life, and I cannot delude myself into believing that if I ignore the beast it will go away. I’ve thought many times that I had recalled all the events around the surgery, only to find a new one. “There are so many pieces of that 45 minutes of my life that remain unknown. My memories are still incomplete and fragmented, but I no longer think that I need to know everything in order to understand what happened. “When the fear subsides I realize I can handle it, but a part of me doubts that I can. The pull to the past is strong; it is the dark side of my life; and I must dwell there from time to time. The struggle may also be a way to know that I survive—a re-playing of the fight to survive—which apparently I won, but cannot own.” An early sign of recovery came when Nancy needed another, more extensive operation. She chose a Boston hospital for the surgery, asked for a preoperative meeting with the surgeons and the anesthesiologist specifically to discuss her prior experience, and requested that I be allowed to join them in the operating room. For the first time in many years I put on a surgical scrub suit and accompanied her into the OR while the anesthesia was induced. This time she woke up to a feeling of safety. Two years later I wrote Nancy asking her permission to use her account of anesthesia awareness in this chapter. In her reply she updated me on the progress of her recovery: “I wish I could say that the surgery to which you were so kind to accompany me ended my suffering. That sadly was not the case. After about six more months I made two choices that proved provident. I left my CBT therapist to work with a psychodynamic psychiatrist and I joined a Pilates class.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  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. The loneliness of sex in a brothel! So that was why my classmates talked so much about it among themselves: they had to rid themselves of the solitude they experienced each time they faced a woman. An adolescent who is in the least bit shy, as I was, finds sex wretched and shameful. One day, I almost discovered intimacy. I had come during a busy period, and I had always refused to wait in line, for I needed to maintain the illusion that I was the only lover of a willing woman. After the disgusting promenade along the closed doors all besieged by waiting men, I was finally taken in by a thin little redhead with a sharp profile and enormous freckles all over her face. Nobody seemed to want her. I was often attracted, in spite of their ugliness, to women who had been ignored, for their expression of sadness made them seem less frightening and more attentive. She welcomed me joyfully and fussed over me and, for some unknown reason, called me her little pinhead. I was almost happy. The next time I came to the district, I made at once for her crib. My hesitant steps found it automatically. She recognized me, called me her little pinhead again, stroked my hair, and made no attempt to hurry me. Afterward, as she was not expecting many customers, we rested alongside each other on the couch. It was winter and the rain was falling outside. She had lit a brazier over which the water from her basin slowly rose in steam. The little room was comfortably warm and we were both nude. Such confident relaxation, only a yard away from the cold and the rain that beat against the door, added to my poise and happiness. She babbled all the while and kept asking questions, ordinary ones as well as some indiscreet ones. I lied a good deal, but answered willingly enough. Physically, I felt satisfied, not having been hurried, I had almost had time to exhaust the unbearable and painful tension with which all other girls had left me. It really was quite something to be chatting away with a woman, both of us nude, and the word “nude,” which I repeated over and over again to myself, seemed full of confused meanings.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The evening progressed, from game to game, and with songs between games. We danced a bit, not too much so as to remain proper, that is to say mainly folk dances and turn-of-the-century numbers, all considered, I gather, less lascivious than modern dancing. A lot of wit was wasted all around. In spite of my willingness and my promises, I found it impossible to feel that I was really a participant in any of the fun. I was always alien, a critical and bad-tempered stranger, and this business of remaining a spectator at a party gave me an unpleasant feeling of watching myself too. Would I ever become an actor? Certainly not, come what may, without some seriousness and bitterness. Meanwhile, I ate and drank a lot, and animal living, as often in my life, prevented me from losing face. All this lasted until after they all had their fill of food; dazzled by the lights and their own sleepiness, exhausted from so much collective excitement, they then decided, as the rhythm of the party had visibly slowed down, to call it a day. It was indeed late, and we decided on the spot which boy would take each girl home. Mina made me her choice, with somewhat of a show of authority, and appointed me to wait on her and on Ginou, like a knight in ancient times. The National Commissioner then gathered us together in a circle for the last time and we sang one more song in four parts, all about the brotherhood of the scouts. Once the last note had ceased to ring, in the silence that was still charged with emotion, the old scoutmaster uttered one last sentence, in a tone of severity, like a command: “Pathfinders, forever...” “Ready!” the others all answered, in a single voice. But I had not joined in the cry. The Commissioner, after that, became familiar again and shook us all by the hand, the left one, raising each time the right forearm with the fingers stiff in the scouts’ grip. As he stopped before me, he smiled rather pointedly, with an air of complicity: I should remember the advice he had given me.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The whole adventure began very badly. It was the first time in my life that I was going away so far and for so long from my family and the blind alley. At the collecting point, I found none of my classmates. We were alone in a crowd of Europeans who were waiting in the shade of the trees and joyously shouting remarks from group to group. The loneliness of my parents, silent and scared, moved me even more deeply than my own. I was seeing them, for the first time, uneasy and ashamed, with all their prestige left behind them in our blind alley. They spoke in muffled tones, probably ashamed of their dialect, which, to me, now seemed vulgar and out of place. As a precaution, we had been asked to turn up much too early and now we had to wait for quite a while. The last cool morning breeze vanished and a humid heat began to weigh on us while the flies buzzed ever more insistently. People who had to go in the sunlight ran from one patch of shade to the next. My father no longer uttered a word. I felt that he was exasperated by weariness, heat, the flies, and a sense of alienation. My mother’s face betrayed, by its softness, that she was on the verge of tears, and her lips were beginning to relax when, at long last, the signal for our departure came. We were then loaded in closed military trucks. I found myself cornered at the back of a truck, no longer able to see my parents for a last farewell. Later, I often experienced this strange feeling of being quite close to them and at the same time kept irremediably apart from them. Only then did the tears at last come to my eyes. The trip was very unpleasant. We had to stand for five hours, our fifty breaths flowing together as we almost stifled beneath the painted tarpaulin of the truck. In near-darkness we were brutally jostled against each other at every bump in the road, while the vibration of the truck made the soles of our feet tingle and made me sick at my stomach. I reached our destination in such a state of exhaustion that I fell asleep at once, barely glancing at the impersonal dormitory in which I had been assigned a bed. I was ten years old, as I’ve said, and an only son. I indeed had my sister Kalla, but in our families the son, especially an only son, is truly a privileged being. For a long while, I actually expected to hear God speak to me personally, and my heart often beat faster if I thought that I could distinguish a voice speaking in the rustling of tree leaves. Always encouraged and confirmed in my awareness of superiority, I was convinced that an extraordinary destiny awaited me.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  A few years ago, on Christmas Eve, I was called to examine a fourteen-year-old boy at the Suffolk County Jail. Jack had been arrested for breaking into the house of neighbors who were away on vacation. The burglar alarm was howling when the police found him in the living room. The first question I asked Jack was who he expected would visit him in jail on Christmas. “Nobody,” he told me. “Nobody ever pays attention to me.” It turned out that he had been caught during break-ins numerous times before. He knew the police, and they knew him. With delight in his voice, he told me that when the cops saw him standing in the middle of the living room, they yelled, “Oh my God, it’s Jack again, that little motherfucker.” Somebody recognized him; somebody knew his name. A little while later Jack confessed, “You know, that is what makes it worthwhile.” Kids will go to almost any length to feel seen and connected. Living with the Parents You HaveChildren have a biological instinct to attach—they have no choice. Whether their parents or caregivers are loving and caring or distant, insensitive, rejecting, or abusive, children will develop a coping style based on their attempt to get at least some of their needs met. We now have reliable ways to assess and identify these coping styles, thanks largely to the work of two American scientists, Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main, and their colleagues, who conducted thousands of hours of observation of mother-infant pairs over many years. Based on these studies, Ainsworth created a research tool called the Strange Situation, which looks at how an infant reacts to temporary separation from the mother. Just as Bowlby had observed, securely attached infants are distressed when their mother leaves them, but they show delight when she returns, and after a brief check-in for reassurance, they settle down and resume their play. But with infants who are insecurely attached, the picture is more complex. Children whose primary caregiver is unresponsive or rejecting learn to deal with their anxiety in two distinct ways. The researchers noticed that some seemed chronically upset and demanding with their mothers, while others were more passive and withdrawn. In both groups contact with the mothers failed to settle them down—they did not return to play contentedly, as happens in secure attachment. In one pattern, called “avoidant attachment,” the infants look like nothing really bothers them—they don’t cry when their mother goes away and they ignore her when she comes back. However, this does not mean that they are unaffected. In fact, their chronically increased heart rates show that they are in a constant state of hyperarousal. My colleagues and I call this pattern “dealing but not feeling.”[12] Most mothers of avoidant infants seem to dislike touching their children. They have trouble snuggling and holding them, and they don’t use their facial expressions and voices to create pleasurable back-and-forth rhythms with their babies.

• From Bluets (2009)

  MAGGIE NELSON BLUETS BLUETS WAVE BOOKS SEATTLE AND NEW YORK MAGGIE NELSON BLUETS PUBLISHED BY WAVE BOOKS WWW.WAVEPOETRY.COM COPYRIGHT © 2009 BY MAGGIE NELSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WAVE BOOKS TITLES ARE DISTRIBUTED TO THE TRADE BY CONSORTIUM BOOK SALES AND DISTRIBUTION PHONE: 800-283-3572 / SAN 631-760X THIS TITLE IS AVAILABLE IN LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHER LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA NELSON, MAGGIE, 1973 – BLUETS / MAGGIE NELSON. — 1ST ED. P. CM. ISBN 978-1-933517-64-3 (PBK. : ALK. PAPER) I. TITLE. PS 3564. E 4687 B 56 2009 811´54—DC22 2009005830 DESIGNED AND COMPOSED BY QUEMADURA 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 FIRST EDITION WAVE BOOKS 020 BLUETS And were it true, we do not think all philosophy is worth one hour of pain . PASCAL , Pensées Contents Bluets Credits 1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal. 2. And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns. 3. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this . 4. I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke—take your pick—an apprehension of the divine. ( This ought to arouse our suspicions .)

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  “Look,” one of them said to me, “see that big building there. That was where they held a thousand of us. They kept us there three days without letting us go out or even leave the straw on which we slept...” “The smell was something...” They were almost proud of their stories and were already reconstructing their memories. “Look, that must be where poor Berdah...” Silence fell. It was a mistake to recall this detail. There were no traces of the machine-gun murder of poor Berdah, the clubfoot who straggled behind. All intent on the joy of returning to town, the men did not want to be reminded of things they could not joke about. Instead, they told me at length of the group-leader’s protest to the German officer who would not permit more than one man to go to the toilets at a time. The leader had proved, with figures in hand, that going there in turns would mean that each man could relieve himself only once every five days. Thus Jewish logic had triumphed over German force, they concluded. It was broad daylight when we reached the Roman aqueduct. As we passed under the enormous antique stone arches which cut across the same blue sky that its ancient builders had seen, I thought I was still dreaming. The men never stopped chattering. Again, they felt a group loyalty and that they were bound to each other by ties of affection. To me, however, they remained as alien as this historical monument. We stopped at the outskirts of the city. The driver could go no further. We paid him and walked toward the first houses. The city was motionless. We hesitated: how would we find it after our long separation? A door opened and a woman emerged with a can of milk. Everything was still in its place. One of the men rediscovered his tongue and his long frustrated desires. “Oh, a woman,” he exclaimed. After that, I went into hiding and thought only of saving my own skin. And I was fortunate, for I survived the raids and bombings until the final German collapse. ~ 6. THE INVENTORY ~

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  There was suddenly light, unexpectedly brilliant, recreating the whole universe around me. I saw that I was seated in the middle of a landing between two floors, and Jean-Jean, a huge boy whose nickname was Hippo, was slowly and heavily climbing the stairs, carrying a bottle in either hand. With him, I entered Michel’s apartment, as disturbed as if I had been visited by signs and portents. I spotted Ginou at once. She had a crowd of boys around her and was beaming with pleasure, her cheeks already flushed with happiness. I took my fill of her vitality, till my eyes and heart were satiated with the bursting health of her complexion, the delicacy of her hair, the dappled colors of her dress, all green and purple. Nearly all the boys had already arrived, but there were still only a few girls at the party. Mina seemed pale from her constant coughing; she threw me a knowing glance that made me ill at ease. Most of the boys were expensively dressed, with custom-made suits of imported English cloth and silk shirts and smart sport shoes; they were already surprisingly like their own parents. Their very natural ease, in such fine clothes, made a deep impression on me, and I felt stiff and solemn in my only good suit. But there was Pinhas too, the leader of the working-class scout outfit! I didn’t know why, but I didn’t like meeting him here. His suit had certainly seen better days too and suffered worse treatment than my own overcoat: his wasn’t even a once-a-year suit. But what was he doing here, so much out of place and so badly dressed? The scout movement, in order to make a show of its interest in ghetto affairs, and also to satisfy some of its own scruples, now wanted to organize a working-class scout group and had asked Pinhas to take charge of it. This whole business, to me, seemed hateful and absurd. Was it at all possible to bring rich men’s boys, well dressed, with their pockets full of petty cash, accustomed to spending enough pocket money on a single outing to feed a whole family on a holiday, together with undernourished urchins dressed in rags? Now the girls who had chosen to come late were arriving too, always two at a time and laden with cakes that they themselves had baked. The boys pretended to be enraptured by the contents of these sumptuous packages and uttered cries of affected admiration. The scout movement didn’t encourage flirting and courtship, so that it was not permitted to make gallant remarks about the appearance of the girls, though most of them were exquisite, and exquisitely dressed.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  While the girls were at work in the kitchen, the Commissioner taught us a new boys’ game. On their travels, commissioners always demonstrate some new games or songs, which help make their visit a success and increase their prestige. Legend would then go: “Do you remember? I mean the game that Gray Wolf taught us way back in 19...“ I joined the girls in the kitchen and offered to help them, but they all laughed and chased me away. Mina, in particular, marked her disapproval: “So you’re the serious one again. Well, go away and play with the others now...” I protested that I had already played and won. “We don’t want you here,” she insisted. “The kitchen is no place for a boy.” The evening progressed, from game to game, and with songs between games. We danced a bit, not too much so as to remain proper, that is to say mainly folk dances and turn-of-the-century numbers, all considered, I gather, less lascivious than modern dancing. A lot of wit was wasted all around. In spite of my willingness and my promises, I found it impossible to feel that I was really a participant in any of the fun. I was always alien, a critical and bad-tempered stranger, and this business of remaining a spectator at a party gave me an unpleasant feeling of watching myself too. Would I ever become an actor? Certainly not, come what may, without some seriousness and bitterness. Meanwhile, I ate and drank a lot, and animal living, as often in my life, prevented me from losing face. All this lasted until after they all had their fill of food; dazzled by the lights and their own sleepiness, exhausted from so much collective excitement, they then decided, as the rhythm of the party had visibly slowed down, to call it a day. It was indeed late, and we decided on the spot which boy would take each girl home. Mina made me her choice, with somewhat of a show of authority, and appointed me to wait on her and on Ginou, like a knight in ancient times. The National Commissioner then gathered us together in a circle for the last time and we sang one more song in four parts, all about the brotherhood of the scouts. Once the last note had ceased to ring, in the silence that was still charged with emotion, the old scoutmaster uttered one last sentence, in a tone of severity, like a command: “Pathfinders, forever...” “Ready!” the others all answered, in a single voice. But I had not joined in the cry. The Commissioner, after that, became familiar again and shook us all by the hand, the left one, raising each time the right forearm with the fingers stiff in the scouts’ grip. As he stopped before me, he smiled rather pointedly, with an air of complicity: I should remember the advice he had given me. “Pathfinders, forever ready!” But ready for what?

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I felt like telling her to go jump into the lagoon, but she had trained me, by now, to suffer in silence. Besides, Ginou was listening, and I would have been incapable of explaining to either of them what I really felt. So I protested lamely: yes, I had had plenty of fun, after my fashion, but I was quite incapable of showing it any more than I had. Mina, as intolerant as ever, refused to believe me and insisted that I was a liar and a clumsy one at that. Mina’s father’s house was in an outer suburb and we had to stop, on the way there, at Ginou’s home. Generally, we agreed tacitly to bring Mina home first and then come back together alone, the two of us. But Ginou now protested that it was late and that she was tired. I didn’t insist and stayed alone with Mina. The one who had originally been our go-between now explained to me that I was not following the right path to win Ginou for good. Ginou would prefer it if I were less complicated, more cheerful, in fact a bit more like the rest of our crowd. I had no desire to argue, so I let Mina chatter away. Finally, my silence seemed to be catching and, when we reached her home, we had both been speechless for some time. On her doorstep, as she shook my hand, Mina gave vent to one of her extraordinary intuitions: “Poor old Alexandre! They’re all like that, even Ginou! You’re in love with her, and you must be ready to pay the price!” Slowly, I made my way home to our Passage. To reach our hallway door, I had to chase away the flock of night-prowling cats that fed out of our ashcans. Not in the least scared, they waited a few feet away, their eyes bright in the darkness. Late though it was, I couldn’t sleep. One more road that I was closing, that closed itself ahead of me. Had I really wanted very deep in me to become a middle-class bourgeois? I wasn’t one and no longer wanted to be one. How could I ever be like Jean- Jean, like the Gazelle, like Michel, like the Commissioner? Polished as pebbles picked up on the seashore, they had no memory. Would I ever be able to forget Pinhas and the others who are like him, merely to save myself? How had I ever been able to believe that I would be able to lead a futile and self- satisfied existence? That evening, perhaps, I caught a glimpse of what their life really is. But that was also the time when I thought I had discovered in myself the signs of a calling, to teach philosophy.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Instead, they told me at length of the group-leader’s protest to the German officer who would not permit more than one man to go to the toilets at a time. The leader had proved, with figures in hand, that going there in turns would mean that each man could relieve himself only once every five days. Thus Jewish logic had triumphed over German force, they concluded. It was broad daylight when we reached the Roman aqueduct. As we passed under the enormous antique stone arches which cut across the same blue sky that its ancient builders had seen, I thought I was still dreaming. The men never stopped chattering. Again, they felt a group loyalty and that they were bound to each other by ties of affection. To me, however, they remained as alien as this historical monument. We stopped at the outskirts of the city. The driver could go no further. We paid him and walked toward the first houses. The city was motionless. We hesitated: how would we find it after our long separation? A door opened and a woman emerged with a can of milk. Everything was still in its place. One of the men rediscovered his tongue and his long frustrated desires. “Oh, a woman,” he exclaimed. After that, I went into hiding and thought only of saving my own skin. And I was fortunate, for I survived the raids and bombings until the final German collapse. ~ 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.

• From Bluets (2009)

  108. Think, for example, of Leonard Cohen’s “famous blue raincoat,” whose principal attribute is that it is “torn at the shoulder.” Perhaps it is even the tear that makes it famous. The song features Cohen at his most lugubrious and opaque, which is saying a lot, but I have always loved its final line—“Sincerely, L. Cohen”—as it makes me feel less alone in composing almost everything I write as a letter. I would even go so far as to say that I do not know how to compose otherwise, which makes writing in a prism of solitude, as I am here, a somewhat novel and painful experiment. “When our companion fails us we transfer our love instantaneously to a worthy object,” wrote Thoreau during his bitter falling-out with Emerson, unwittingly offering a cogent explanation of how and why so many songwriters have personified blue as the one friend they can count on. It “loves me when I’m lonely / And thinks of me first,” sings Lucinda Williams. But really this is very strange—as if blue not only had a heart, but also a mind . 109. Over time my injured friend’s feet have become blue and smooth from disuse. Their blue is the blue of skim milk, their smoothness that of a baby’s. I think they look and feel very strange and beautiful. She does not agree. How could she—this is her body; its transformations, her grief. Often we examine parts of her body together, as if their paralysis had rendered them objects of inquiry independent of us both. But they are still hers. No matter what happens to our bodies in our lifetimes, no matter if they become like “pebbles in water,” they remain ours; us, theirs. 110. In Tender Buttons , Stein seems particularly worried about color and pain that seem to come from nowhere, for no reason. “Why is there a single piece of any color . . . Why is there so much useless suffering.” About blue itself, Stein offers but this koan: “Every bit of blue is precocious.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  A wave of anguish sometimes comes over me quite suddenly in the course of conversation with someone who is in other respects quite indifferent to me; then I discover an odor, a color, a fragment of some object that has reminded me of those hateful afternoons. I developed the habit of secretly wandering away from my companions and the clearing in the wood. As soon as I no longer heard their voices clearly, I was even more lonely, but at last able to weep over my own loneliness. I wept bitter tears, my breathing interrupted by my gasps as I allowed myself an orgy of pity for myself and my own powerlessness. My Christian companions had at least one event that came to interrupt the monotony of those days — I mean Sunday morning mass. I was surprised to note that I no longer knew the days of the week, though I had been accustomed never to be wrong on this point. Sunday mass brought order into the week of the Christians: as early as Saturday night, they were aroused from their weekday apathy. They had managed to obtain permission, on that day, to remain in the camp in order to brush and press their clothes and take their weekly baths. I envied them their preoccupations, their awareness of the importance of the moment. The next morning, close to the dormitory, we watched the believers gather in a small group. Their hair shiny with lotion, their clean shirts, everything about them conspired to make them at the same time unusually excited and quiet. On their return from the village where they attended mass, well after noon, they would describe to us with interest everything that they had seen. As for us, our Sunday morning was made different only by their gaiety. It was Mimouni who gave me the idea of it, confiding in me his intention of attending mass. They seemed to be having fun there, and at least one went through the village on the way to mass. Although he seemed pretty sure of himself, he was anxious at heart and asked me to accompany him because he hoped, thanks to my approval, to gain some assurance.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  In any gathering, I found myself with my back to the wall, an outsider in every respect, alien to the joys of the others as well as to their sorrows. This was a bitter experience, but I still had too much hope to be afraid of my lucid detachment. I was, in fact, arrogantly delighted by its novelty. Thus began my hand-to-hand struggle with language, if only because my pronunciation of the French r and of the nasals was wrong. Dimly, I felt that I would penetrate into the soul of this civilization by mastering its language. I wrote without pause and was never satisfied because I saw that I nearly always worked on the skin of things and failed to reach the flesh. I sometimes asked myself riddles: what is the right word for such and such a thing? It seemed to me that objects would remain foreign to me until I was able to name them correctly. So I often sought a particular word for a long while, questioning everyone around me. When I had found the word, I would repeat it over and over in a loud voice, like an incantation. I had grasped the “thing” and could invoke it at will: a part of the world was subjected to me. I pretended, however, to reject too pure, too refined a language, one that follows rules that are too strict. It was the meaning that mattered and must by itself dictate the words that would describe this meaning. I would use slang or invent my own words, or put down blatantly incorrect ones if the proper ones seemed ineffective. I no longer know whether I was really sincere. Perhaps I felt that, despite all my efforts, I would never be as adept at the language as my companions whom birth had endowed with an almost perfect linguistic equipment. The monthly report for Monsieur Bismuth reminded me that my efforts were not entirely for myself. The envious respect of the other students was a source of pleasure for me, and the compliments of my teacher for all my work were a compensation. I saw how the others looked around when I volunteered to recite in class, and how the teacher smiled. In these looks and smiles I could see myself victorious, like a young god. True, I worked like a brute; it was largely for this taste of revenge that I struggled so relentlessly for prizes and honors. But none of the other boys ever suspected what these things meant to me. What I wanted was more than their processed schoolbook learning. I began to discover the world of books and to catalogue it; I read tons of printed paper, at meals, in the street until the school bell rang, in bed until one in the morning.