I Who Have Never Known Men

This was the first time I'd listened closely, and I was surprised at how much they had to say, the passion with which they repeated the same thing in ten different ways so as to avoid accepting that they'd had absolutely nothing to say to one another for ages. But human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity, as I've realised these past few years. And gradually, I began to feel sorry for those women determined to carry on living, pretending they were active and making decisions in the prison where they were locked up for ever, from which death was the only release – but would they remove the bodies? – and where they couldn't even kill one another.

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ceyda

@laurelhell·

It was only at the moment of death that they admitted their despair and rushed headlong towards the great, dark doors that I opened for them, leaving the sterile plain where their lives had gone awry without a backward glance, eager to embrace another world which perhaps didn’t exist, but they preferred nothingness to the futile succession of empty days. And I know that at that moment, they loved me.

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ilepuk

@ilepuk·

2mo

208 syf.

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Karşıma nasıl ve nereden çıktığını bilmediğim bu kitabı okuduğum için çok mutluyum. İlk sayfaların kafa karıştırıcı yönleri oldu ama kitabı bitirdikten sonra başa dönüp tekrar okuduğumda her şey yerine oturdu. Yine de "yeni bir dil öğrenmek bu kadar kolayken çevirilere ne gerek var" cümlesi o kadar manasız ve yersizdi ki sinirimi bozmaya devam etti. Öyle ki sadece bu cümle yüzünden bir puan kırmayı düşündüm ve kitap boyunca bu cümle aklımda yankılandıkça sinirlerim bozuldu. Ama öyle güzeldi ki be! Kitap boyunca sevgi, insan olmak, hayattaki minik zevkler, dostluk, özgürlük, kadınlık, çocukluk ve merhamet gibi pek çok kavramı sorguladım. Üstelik olayın akışı içerisinde o kadar güzel ve doğal bir şekilde sorguladım ki düşüncelerim akışı bölmedi. Karakterlerin aklındaki sorular, bizim aklımızdaki sorular asla cevaplanmadı. Korku, heyecan, umutsuzluk hiç bitmedi. Neden cevap bulamıyorum diye sinirlendim ama sonra fark ettim. Cevapsız bir deney, cevapsız bir kitap, cevapsız bir dünya, cevapsız bir hayat... Viyana high society clup üyesi, hayat nedir bilmezken buhranlarıyla kafamızı bik bik biken mal herifler, okuyun da ders alın.

I Who Have Never Known MenJacqueline Harpman · Vintage · 20190 okunma

Su

‘What do they want of us?’ I asked again. She shrugged. ‘All we know is what they don’t want.’

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Su

The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women? I think that time must have something to do with the duration of pregnancies, the growth of children, all those things that I haven't experienced. If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response. The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don't exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come – I am not even sure that humanity has survived that mysterious event that governed my life. But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. I will only be truly dead if nobody ever comes, if the centuries, then the millennia go by for so long that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone's mind. Then everything will be obliterated, the suns will burn out and I will disappear like the universe.

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Su

He was a loner, like me, a proud man, and I was leaving, knowing nothing of him other than his final plan. But that at least he had achieved. He'd wanted to face his destiny to the last, and someone knew it. As long as I lived, my memory of him would live too, there would be a witness to his pride and solitude. I stopped, hesitated for a moment, then went back down to gaze at him for a long time. There was nothing new to be discovered on his parchment face. I felt a profound sadness. I told myself that that was perhaps how, in the time of the humans, people said goodbye to the body of a cherished lover, by trying to engrave them in their memory. I knew nothing about him, but I knew nothing about myself, except that, one day, I too would die and that, like him, I would prop myself up and remain upright, looking straight ahead until the last, and, when death triumphed over my gaze, I would be like a proud monument raised with hatred in the face of silence.

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