Jacqueline Harpman Gönderileri
Jacqueline Harpman kitaplarını, Jacqueline Harpman sözleri ve alıntılarını, Jacqueline Harpman yazarlarını, Jacqueline Harpman yorumları ve incelemelerini 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.
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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I was perfectly aware that I had only added another question to all the others, but it was a new one, and, in the absurd world in which I lived, and still live, that was happiness.
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[…] those contorted bodies that lived there, piled haphazardly, perpetual inhabitants of horror and silence.
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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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I felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious.
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Sitting on the bench, gazing towards the setting sun, she lost her mind in the cerebral convolutions, the mysterious nooks and crannies of the memory, she had gone backwards, seeking a world that made sense, losing her way among the labyrinths, slowly deteriorating, dimming, noiselessly being obliterated and then fading away so gradually that it was impossible to pinpoint the transition between the flickering little flame and the shadows.
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'It's true,' she agreed. 'You are the only one of us who belongs to this country.'
'No, this country belongs to me. I will be its sole owner and everything here will be mine.'
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I laughed too, I remember now, because I'd stopped seeing the women as enemies since I'd been giving them what I could: the time.
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‘I don’t know what all this may lead to,’ I told her, ‘but that’s what’s so exciting: in our absurd existence, I’ve invented something unexpected.’
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‘What do they want of us?’ I asked again. She shrugged.
‘All we know is what they don’t want.’
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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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[…] and then I understood that, alone and terrified, anger was my only weapon against the horror.
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When I went to pass water, I found it perfectly natural to go and sit on the toilet seat and carry on my conversation – on the few occasions when I was engaged in conversation. The old women cursed furiously, complaining about the indignity of being reduced to the status of animals. If the only thing that differentiates us from animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little, I thought.
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As I write these words, my tale is over. Everything around me is in order and I have fulfilled the final task I set myself. It only took me a month, which has perhaps been the happiest month of my life. I do not understand that: after all, what I was describing was only my strange existence which hasn't brought me much joy. Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else.
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