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It didn't add up to much. They were the first to be aware of this, and they often wondered, standing in the middle of the pack, what they were doing there, out in the cold, in the rain, in these sinister parts of the town — Bastille, Nation, Hôtel de Ville. They wished something would happen to prove that what they were doing was important, necessary, irreplaceable, that their fear-struck efforts would have a meaning for them, would be something they needed, something that might help them to know themselves, to change themselves, to live. No: their real lives were elsewhere, in a near or distant future also full of menace, but of a more subtle, less straightforward kind: traps you could not touch, spellbound webs.
On occasions they wished everything would stay the same, not ever move. Then they would be able just to drift. Their life would keep them warm: it would stretch ahead through the months and years without - or almost without - altering, without ever hampering them. It would be but the harmonious sequence of their days and nights, the one almost imperceptibly modulating the other, a never-ending reprise of the same themes, a continuous happiness, a perpetuated enjoyment which no upset, no tragic event, no twist or turn of fate would ever bring into question.
At other times they could not stand it a moment longer. They wanted to fight, and to win. But how could they fight? Whom would they fight? What should they fight? They lived in a strange and shimmering world, the bedazzling universe of a market culture, in prisons of plenty, in the bewitching traps of comfort and happiness.
Where were the dangers? Where were the threats? In the past men fought in their millions, and millions still do fight, for their crust of bread. Jérôme and Sylvie did not quite believe you could go into battle for a chesterfield settee. But that was all the same the banner under which they would have enlisted most readily. There was nothing, they thought, that concerned them in party manifestos or in government plans: they would sneer at early retirement pension schemes, increased holiday entitlements, free lunches, the thirty-hour week. They wanted superabundance - Garrard turntables, empty beaches for their eyes only, round-the-world trips, grand hotels.
The enemy was unseen. Or, rather, the enemy was within them, it had rotted them, infected them, eaten them away. They were the hollow men, the turkey round the stuffing. Tame pets, faithfully reflecting a world which taunted them. They were up to their necks in a cream cake from which they would only ever be able to nibble crumbs.
But friendships, too, began to fray. Some evenings, within the finite fields of their unspacious rooms, the couples that had come together crossed swords by word and eye. Some evenings, they finally grasped that their fine friendships, their almost hermetic language, their private jokes, this shared world, shared language, the common gestures they had made up, were based on nothing: theirs was a shrunken universe, a world running out of steam, opening onto nothing. Their lives were not conquests, but slow collapses, dispersions. That was when they realised how deeply they were condemned to habit, to sluggishness. They were bored in each other's company as if all there had ever been between them was a void. Puns, boozing, walks in the woods, dinner parties, endless discussions about films, plans, gossip had long stood in for adventure, history and truth. But the words were hollow, the gestures empty, without substance, without consequence, without a future, words repeated a thousand times, hands shaken a thousand times, ritual actions which no longer afforded them any protection.
They would drift from marvel to marvel, from surprise to surprise. All they had to do was to live, to be there, for the world to offer itself to them whole. Their ships, their trains, their rockets crisscrossed the planet. The world was in their arms, with its wheat-covered counties, its fish-full seas, its peaks and its deserts, its flowery landscapes, beaches, islands, trees and treasures, with its huge and long-abandoned factories buried underground making the finest woollen cloths and the brightest silks for them alone.
makes me think of dfw's cruise ship essay lol
[...] A few books were swapped, and a few records; there was the odd discussion at La Régence; and that was that. No warm hospitality, no keen friendship. That wasn't a plant that grew in Sfax. People turned in on themselves, in their houses that were too big for them.
oof
It soon occurred to them that they were going to stop living altogether. Time passed and stood still. There was no longer anything to keep them in touch with the world, apart from eternally out-of-date newspapers which they began to suspect were well-meaning fabrications, or the memories of anterior life, shadows of another world. They had always lived in Sfax, they would always live there. They had lost all their plans, all their impatience. They looked forward to nothing, not even to holidays too far over the horizon, not even to returning to France.
Their life was like an unrelinquished habit, an almost unruffled tedium: a life sans everything.
They bought nothing. Obviously, to some degree, because they did not know how to buy and were worried about having to haggle, but above all because they did not feel drawn to these things. None of them, however lavish they could occasionally be, gave them a feeling of wealth. They moved on, amused or indifferent, but all they saw remained foreign, belonged to another world, did not concern them. And from these trips they brought back only images of emptiness and drought: desolate heaths, tundra, sea inlets, a mineral world where nothing grows: their own world of loneliness, their own dry desert.
It now seemed to them that before - and each day, that before receded further into the past, as if their anterior life was falling slowly into the domain of legend, of the unreal, or of the shapeless - before, they had had at least a passion for possessing. Often it was wanting that had been all their existence. They had felt drawn towards the future, impatient, consumed with desire.
And then what? What had they done? What had happened?
Something resembling a quiet and very gentle tragedy was entering the heart of their decelerating lives. They were adrift in the rubble of a very ancient dream, lost amidst unrecognisable ruins.
There was nothing left. They were at the finishing line, at the terminus of the doubtful trajectory which had been their life for six years, at the end of that uncertain quest which had taken them nowhere, which had taught them nothing.
The journey will be pleasant for a long while. Towards noon they will wander nonchalantly down to the dining car. They will sit by a window, facing each other. They will order two whiskies. They will look at each other one last time with a smile of complicity. The starched table linen, the solid cutlery engraved with the arms of the Compagnie des Wagons-Lits, the weighty, emblazoned crockery will seem like a prelude to a sumptuous feast. But the meal they will be served will be quite simply tasteless . . .
amen