Re: marguerite durasjessicahallockDecember 1 2009, 23:14:09 UTC
in practicalities:
71 // You get yourself into that sort of situation, without thinking, and there you are. I can't see even a couple of days ahead in my life. Either with this man or without him - it's the same as in quite different affairs from ours. It's true - to confirm what I said to Veinstein - it's not a question of suffering. It's a ratification of an original despair, dating you might almost say from childhood, as if all of a sudden you experienced the same sense of impossibility as you felt when you were eight years old. A sense of impossibility when you looked at things, people, the sea, life, the limited nature of your own body; or the trees in the forest, which you couldn't get to without risking death; or the sailing of liners, which seemed to be going away for ever and ever; or my mother, mourning my dead father with a grief we knew to be childish but which might take her away from us.
75 // All around the hand was the noise of the train. All around the train, the darkness. The silence of the corridors within the noise of the train.
77 // I have no story, just as I have no life. My story is pulverized every day, every second of every day, by the immediacy of life, and it's impossible for me to see clearly what's usually called one's life.
31 // I'm the only one who knows what kind of blue the girl in the book's scarf is.
31-32 // A piece of writing is a whole that proceeds as a whole - it never presents itself as a matter of choice. Even if I find at the end of a book that one of the characters really loved a certain other character and not the one I've indicated, I don't alter the book's past, which is already written - I alter its future. When I myself notice the love isn't what I thought, I'm with the new love, I start off again with it. I don't say the love that's abandoned was wrong; I say it's dead. After the dinner at LVS's the colours remain the same, the colours of the walls and those in the garden. No one knows yet what is just about to change.
57 // When shall we tire of it, that forest of our despair?
65 // I said I didn't care about clothes, but that's wrong. A uniform is an attempt to reconcile form and content, to match what you think you look like with what you'd like to look like, what you think you are with what you want to suggest. You find this match without really looking for it. And once it's found it's permanent. And eventually it comes to define you.
67 // Writers' bodies are involved in their writing. Writers invite sexuality. Like kings and other people in power. As regards men, it's as if they'd slept with our minds, penetrated our minds at the same time as our bodies. There haven't been any exceptions as far as I'm concerned. The same kind of fascination operated even with lovers wo weren't intellectuals. And for a worker a woman who writes books - that's something he'll never have. It's like that all over the world, for all writers, men and women alike. They're sex objects par excellence. When I was still very young I was attracted to elderly men because they were writers. I've never been able to imagine sex without intelligence, or intelligence without a kind of absence from oneself.
71 // You get yourself into that sort of situation, without thinking, and there you are. I can't see even a couple of days ahead in my life. Either with this man or without him - it's the same as in quite different affairs from ours. It's true - to confirm what I said to Veinstein - it's not a question of suffering. It's a ratification of an original despair, dating you might almost say from childhood, as if all of a sudden you experienced the same sense of impossibility as you felt when you were eight years old. A sense of impossibility when you looked at things, people, the sea, life, the limited nature of your own body; or the trees in the forest, which you couldn't get to without risking death; or the sailing of liners, which seemed to be going away for ever and ever; or my mother, mourning my dead father with a grief we knew to be childish but which might take her away from us.
75 // All around the hand was the noise of the train. All around the train, the darkness. The silence of the corridors within the noise of the train.
77 // I have no story, just as I have no life. My story is pulverized every day, every second of every day, by the immediacy of life, and it's impossible for me to see clearly what's usually called one's life.
31 // I'm the only one who knows what kind of blue the girl in the book's scarf is.
31-32 // A piece of writing is a whole that proceeds as a whole - it never presents itself as a matter of choice. Even if I find at the end of a book that one of the characters really loved a certain other character and not the one I've indicated, I don't alter the book's past, which is already written - I alter its future. When I myself notice the love isn't what I thought, I'm with the new love, I start off again with it. I don't say the love that's abandoned was wrong; I say it's dead. After the dinner at LVS's the colours remain the same, the colours of the walls and those in the garden. No one knows yet what is just about to change.
57 // When shall we tire of it, that forest of our despair?
65 // I said I didn't care about clothes, but that's wrong. A uniform is an attempt to reconcile form and content, to match what you think you look like with what you'd like to look like, what you think you are with what you want to suggest. You find this match without really looking for it. And once it's found it's permanent. And eventually it comes to define you.
67 // Writers' bodies are involved in their writing. Writers invite sexuality. Like kings and other people in power. As regards men, it's as if they'd slept with our minds, penetrated our minds at the same time as our bodies. There haven't been any exceptions as far as I'm concerned. The same kind of fascination operated even with lovers wo weren't intellectuals. And for a worker a woman who writes books - that's something he'll never have. It's like that all over the world, for all writers, men and women alike. They're sex objects par excellence. When I was still very young I was attracted to elderly men because they were writers. I've never been able to imagine sex without intelligence, or intelligence without a kind of absence from oneself.
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