As I read the excerpts from Annie Ernaux's Simple Passion, I was underlining like a madwoman. It felt like she was speaking directly to my personal experiences in an eloquent and realized way. I liked the way that Ernaux characterized her relationship with her desires- a masochistic/sadistic relationship of sorts, where the feeling you love and feel so attached to is also slowly killing everything else you once felt passion for.
Some stand out quotes, among many:
pg 4, "I behaved in an artificial manner. The only actions involving willpower, desire, and what I take to be human intelligence, were all related to this man."
- This seems to happen all the time when someone gets into a relationship with a new lover; all of a sudden, one passion succumbs all the others and every emotion gets redirected to this passion. Simple everyday conversations become directed to the object of desire and anything that doesn't relate, gets the cold shoulder of indifference.
Ernaux also discusses a yearning to establish credibility to her feelings through other people's experiences. If she heard about a relationship between a man and woman, she automatically made connections- as she said, "I felt they could teach me something about A and that they lent credibility to the things I wished to believe." It seems that we are constantly yearning to learn the inner workings of the "other", especially if the other is of the opposite sex. I know that the popular media tends to promote this; magazines like Glamour "unlocking" the secrets of the mysterious male- why doesn't he call? Why are his texts so cryptic? They use the promise of these answers as bait to reel in curious female minds, although no one can really provide them.
pg 27, "Sometimes I told myself that he might spend a whole day without even thinking about me. I imagined him getting up, drinking his coffee, talking and laughing, as if I didn't exist. Compared to my own obsession, such indifference filled me with wonder. How could this be?"
- This quote speaks to the desire to "know" someone; to understand their experience of the relationship and their perception of you. When you are so embedded in your own reality, you find it difficult to see how the other person could feel different, and how dare they! How dare they treat you with such indifference when you've devoted so much of yourself to the relationship! Again, it all comes down to your desires, your needs. It's not at all about the other person's reality- we only want to understand the other because it brings us closer to understanding how to get what we want.
pg 20, "I could experience only absence or presence."
- The strictly linear relationship we have with the other is daunting to think about, because the other can never be known. Our experience can only be one or the other- the other is physically there, the other is not there. Whether that person is there in every sense of the word, is unknown. As much as we'd like to uncover the perpetual mystery of the other, we can only get so close. The more you want it, and believe this absolute closeness is possible, the farther away it becomes. Each person has their own agenda, and if you are not a part of it, there's really nothing you can do, and it's even harder to understand why.
pg 33, second reading, "I experienced pleasure like a future pain."
- This is the quote that led to my comparison of the relationship to desire as a masochistic/sadistic one, because the pain of pleasure, and the pleasure of pain seem to be the same. When we indulge our desires, we know we're going to feel the pain of that moment ending immediately after we savor the pleasure of it, but we are okay with it. The pain of desire feeds into the pleasure of love, and we couldn't have pleasure without that pain.
pg 39, second reading, "My whole body ached. I would have liked to tear out the pain but it was everywhere. I longed for a burglar to come into my bedroom and kill me."
- The extreme pain of the realization of the loss of a lover is always likened to a life or death situation; a pain so severe we'd prefer absolute indifference in the form of death. In the moment, it feels like life will never go long, and you'll always be consumed with the fact that you aren't going to get what you want. Life's firm and unforgiving refusal to indulge such a strong desire delivers a hard blow, and it takes a while to recover. Of course, if you're a character in a story, most likely you are going to die to illustrate the severity of such feelings. Thinking about my own experiences with this, I remember going over each and every detail of the person with a fine tooth comb- although it wasn't really the person I was analyzing, but my perception of them and their qualities that I really wanted. I mourned the loss of someone who I thought matched my exact desires and needs in a partner, although in retrospect I know I was idealizing the situation.
pg. 59, second reading, "I had decided to learn his language. I kept, without washing it, a glass from which he had drunk."
- I really liked the way Ernaux worded this sentence- although there was an obvious language barrier between these two, there was a much more important barrier in place- the unique language of an individual's actions, words, and semantics. People may typically use standard languages to express themselves, but they use these languages in a particular way. Individual expression is just that, individual, and the individual is the only one who really understands what is being expressed. The difference between intention and perception is vast, and often is an obstacle in relationships. Why is it that we are constantly fighting to understand each other, decode the other's semantics, figure out what is really meant? It seems to always be so hard, because we all approach language with a specific culture, specific motives, needs, etc. Ernaux's attempt to get closer to A's language by keeping his glass, thinking that perhaps the spread of DNA on the glass's surface will reveal a long kept secret, is interesting and she's certainly not alone.
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