so I recited:
Your body is a slender ear of corn
From which the grain has dropped and won't take root
Your body's like a slender ear of corn
Your body is a skein of silk
With longing written into every fold
Your body's like a skein of silk
Your body is a burnt-out sky
And death dreams under cover in its weave
Your body's like a burnt-out sky
Your body is so silent
Its tears quiver beneath my lids
Your body is so silent
I had my arm on Lucie's shoulder (covered only by the thin material of her flowered dress), I felt it under my fingers, and succumbed to the
suggestion that the lines I was reading (a slow-moving litany) referred to the sorrow of Lucie's body, a quiet, resigned body, condemned to death. Then I read her some more poems, including the one that to this day calls forth her image to me; it ends with the lines:
Fatuous words I don't trust you I trust silence
More than beauty more than anything A festival of understanding Suddenly I felt Lucie's shoulder shaking under my fingers; she was crying.
What had made her cry? The meaning of the words? The ineffable sadness flowing from the melody of the verse and the timbre of my voice? Had she perhaps been elevated by the hermetic solemnity of the poems and moved to tears by that elevation? Or had the lines simply broken through a secret barrier within her and lifted a weight long accumulating there?
I do not know. Lucie held me round the neck like a child, her head pressed against the cloth of the green uniform stretched across my chest, and she cried and cried and cried.
9
MANY times in recent years women of all kinds have reproached me (because I was unable to reciprocate their feelings) with being conceited. This is nonsense, I'm not in the least conceited, but to be frank, it does pain me to think that not since reaching maturity have I been able to establish a true relationship with a woman, that I have never, as they say, been in love with a woman. I'm not sure I know the reasons for this failure, whether they lie in some innate emotional deficiency or in my life history; I don't mean to sound pompous, but the truth remains: the image of that lecture hall with a hundred people raising their hands, giving the order to destroy my life, comes back to me again and again. Those hundred people had no idea that things would one day begin to change, they counted on my being an outcast for life. Not out of a desire for martyrdom but rather out of the malicious obstinacy characteristic of reflection, I have often composed imaginary variations; I have imagined, for example, what it would have been like if instead of expulsion from the Party the verdict had been hanging by the neck. No matter how I construe it, I can't see them doing anything but raising their hands again, especially if the utility of my hanging had been movingly argued in the opening address. Since then, whenever I make new acquaintances, men or women with the potential of becoming friends or lovers, I project them back into that time, that hall, and ask myself whether they would have raised their hands; no one has ever passed the test: every one of them has raised his hand in the same way my former friends and colleagues (willingly or not, out of conviction or fear) raised theirs. You must admit: it's hard to live with people willing to send you to exile or death, it's hard to become intimate with them, it's hard to love them.
Perhaps it was cruel of me to submit the people I met to such merciless scrutiny when it was highly likely they would have led a more or less quiet everyday life in my proximity, beyond good and evil, and never passed through that hall where hands are raised. Say I did it for one purpose only: to elevate myself above everyone else in my moral complacency. But to accuse me of conceit would be quite unjust; I have never voted for anyone's downfall, but I am perfectly aware that this is of questionable merit, since I was deprived of the right to raise my hand. It's true
Your body is a slender ear of corn
From which the grain has dropped and won't take root
Your body's like a slender ear of corn
Your body is a skein of silk
With longing written into every fold
Your body's like a skein of silk
Your body is a burnt-out sky
And death dreams under cover in its weave
Your body's like a burnt-out sky
Your body is so silent
Its tears quiver beneath my lids
Your body is so silent
I had my arm on Lucie's shoulder (covered only by the thin material of her flowered dress), I felt it under my fingers, and succumbed to the
suggestion that the lines I was reading (a slow-moving litany) referred to the sorrow of Lucie's body, a quiet, resigned body, condemned to death. Then I read her some more poems, including the one that to this day calls forth her image to me; it ends with the lines:
Fatuous words I don't trust you I trust silence
More than beauty more than anything A festival of understanding Suddenly I felt Lucie's shoulder shaking under my fingers; she was crying.
What had made her cry? The meaning of the words? The ineffable sadness flowing from the melody of the verse and the timbre of my voice? Had she perhaps been elevated by the hermetic solemnity of the poems and moved to tears by that elevation? Or had the lines simply broken through a secret barrier within her and lifted a weight long accumulating there?
I do not know. Lucie held me round the neck like a child, her head pressed against the cloth of the green uniform stretched across my chest, and she cried and cried and cried.
9
MANY times in recent years women of all kinds have reproached me (because I was unable to reciprocate their feelings) with being conceited. This is nonsense, I'm not in the least conceited, but to be frank, it does pain me to think that not since reaching maturity have I been able to establish a true relationship with a woman, that I have never, as they say, been in love with a woman. I'm not sure I know the reasons for this failure, whether they lie in some innate emotional deficiency or in my life history; I don't mean to sound pompous, but the truth remains: the image of that lecture hall with a hundred people raising their hands, giving the order to destroy my life, comes back to me again and again. Those hundred people had no idea that things would one day begin to change, they counted on my being an outcast for life. Not out of a desire for martyrdom but rather out of the malicious obstinacy characteristic of reflection, I have often composed imaginary variations; I have imagined, for example, what it would have been like if instead of expulsion from the Party the verdict had been hanging by the neck. No matter how I construe it, I can't see them doing anything but raising their hands again, especially if the utility of my hanging had been movingly argued in the opening address. Since then, whenever I make new acquaintances, men or women with the potential of becoming friends or lovers, I project them back into that time, that hall, and ask myself whether they would have raised their hands; no one has ever passed the test: every one of them has raised his hand in the same way my former friends and colleagues (willingly or not, out of conviction or fear) raised theirs. You must admit: it's hard to live with people willing to send you to exile or death, it's hard to become intimate with them, it's hard to love them.
Perhaps it was cruel of me to submit the people I met to such merciless scrutiny when it was highly likely they would have led a more or less quiet everyday life in my proximity, beyond good and evil, and never passed through that hall where hands are raised. Say I did it for one purpose only: to elevate myself above everyone else in my moral complacency. But to accuse me of conceit would be quite unjust; I have never voted for anyone's downfall, but I am perfectly aware that this is of questionable merit, since I was deprived of the right to raise my hand. It's true
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