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The Baffler
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We live uneasily the only way we know how, ever more anxious that the earth under our feet is turning to quicksand, while a fierce wind howls at the horizon. Hauling oneself out of one’s elemental presence-ism and presentism is nearly impossible: all the institutions, structures, and systems we live within are predicated on the indefinite persistence of the present. These are the structures and systems and institutions that give our choices meaning, connect us with each other, allow us to see our lives not as transient, atomistic accidents but as coherent, organic parts of a greater whole. Yet as the world changes around us, we are increasingly aware that something is wrong: the future isn’t what it used to be, and the temporal stability we depend on to give our present reality the illusion of persistence seems less and less reliable. We begin to wonder whether thinking fifty, thirty, twenty, or even five years into the future makes any sense, since the global transformation that seems to be steadily approaching—whether for good or for ill, through revolution or through collapse—will overturn everything we hold dear. We find ourselves existentially threatened by ecological collapse and climate change not only in the material sense that it will lead to vast human suffering and billions of deaths but also in a philosophical or psychological sense, in that the promise of imminent catastrophe—or revolution—threatens to make our present day-to-day life meaningless.
fuck
All of this is to say that we can identify several themes in the Obama administration’s grand Appalachian economic development initiative. First: never meet peoples’ material needs directly or encourage them to organize. Rather, study the feasibility of giving them things, or throw some money at a community college, which can train people in the art of being a well-behaved and productive worker, so that they can then get things themselves. Second: if you absolutely must build any infrastructure, make sure that it’s in service to something else, like a wildlife viewing facility or a prison. Third: use as many fancy words as possible to make it sound like you’re keeping busy. Target and deploy your dislocated coal workers to maximize creative potential so that we can create a thriving and diverse restorative economy in the mountains.
And finally, the fourth and most important thing: remember that you don’t actually owe anybody anything, that the government has ceased delivering people even their most basic needs, that it has in fact altogether stopped caring if they live or die. Remember that agencies like the Appalachian Regional Commission exist first and foremost to facilitate industry, and that the grant they’ve given you is meant to be deployed for that purpose. Remember that the story you tell is more important than the work you do, which should never amount to more than attending conferences and joining conference calls. And through it all, don’t forget to tell your friends and family that you’re helping the poor people of Appalachia who are too dumb and broke and demoralized and addicted to help themselves.
With Guillaume life carried on as usual. Only one thing had changed: she felt less desire for him. In every other respect, she loved him and was very happy with him, while Thomas was confined to what she thought of as daydreams. Deep down, however, she was certain she would run into Thomas again the following summer in Sorge, since he came there every year, and that certainty was a foundation. Guillaume suggested going away together the following August. Anna was okay with any other month of the year, but not August. “Well, that’s new,” he said, “you always used to say you liked getting away from Sorge in the summer.” “I did?” she said. “People change.” And she pretended to attach no importance to it all. She was busy with her articles, exhibitions she had to see. Whenever she went to Lille, Lyon, Geneva, Marseilles, she would regret it wasn’t Bordeaux. But even in Marseilles or Lausanne she hoped to run into Thomas in the street. After all, she thought, he can travel about, too. From this point on, then, the world was filled with his presence, since anywhere, at any moment, he might appear on a street (it was always a street) and walk toward her.
But this time something had changed. On the two previous occasions when she had conceived a burning passion for someone, she’d never been quite sure the other party would respond; she’d probably even known from the outset he wouldn’t. In Thomas she had glimpsed the possibility, not only of a response, but of a fire identical to her own. How had she seen this? Who knows . . . ? Each morning (or every other morning sometimes, for they needed to catch their breath and rest a bit, no doubt), they would run into each other in Sorge, and sometimes in another part of town, for there was no need any longer to focus on the precise spot where they’d first met. Fate, having slipped into gear, was easing up. Anna would go out, pick up a couple of items of shopping and then stroll about, going as far as the café terrace facing the countryside or the town hall opposite. Thomas, meanwhile, would have gone to see a mechanic on the outskirts of town or to visit a friend, but it was most unusual if, some time around eleven, he didn’t pop up all of a sudden, even in some obscure side street, walking toward her. Without remarking on their chance encounter, they would have a coffee somewhere and talk about the town, their activities, what they were reading, but never of personal matters, and never face to face, seated together, side by side, at the small round bistro table.
[...] You can pretend to disclose them to your hairdresser or your gynecologist, to certain friends, but in reality you disclose nothing, you just appear to be talking about a love affair, an awkward choice to be made between two men, and by transforming your story into that of millions of men and women since the world began — falling in love with someone when you’re perfectly happy with someone else — laying bare a very ancient conflict to which no one has ever found a solution. “You have to choose,” said some, “you have to decide one way or the other.” “You should conduct the affair in secret but stay with Guillaume,” said others. “You have to let it go,” urged some. “But you must know which one you truly love,” declared still others. But how can you choose in life without cutting your own self in two? For it’s not about, on the one hand, a man, and on the other, another. It’s about a life — beating, quivering like an organ laid bare — to which both men belong; and if you break with one of them, whichever one it might be, you might not survive.
At more settled moments in her life, Anna, each time some powerful emotion or torment came crashing down, would compare her situation, which was essentially very happy, to that of people who had had to endure some terrible misfortune foisted on them from without. And she would feel ashamed for being so extravagantly affected by little setbacks and misunderstandings, fallings-out. At moments like these she would have been capable of remarking that women given to falling passionately in love are often idle, with nothing much to do with their time and seldom any care for the morrow. Could anyone imagine Phèdre with a job? It’s a spiritual luxury, being in a position to enjoy these overwhelming emotions, which can certainly kill you or drive you insane, but at the same time are the mark of some deep-seated transformation. And yet it’s so wonderful to have the leisure to be transformed, to give yourself up to this perilous play, when so many people are compelled to think, first and foremost, of simply hanging on.
In the afternoon, they walk together along a path bordered with yellow reeds where, from time to time, herons drift softly by. It pains her, it pains her greatly, to be walking there with him, and not with Guillaume; and that pain will be inscribed in her for months to come. Nearly every time she’s with him, albeit of her own free will, of her own desire, it will pain her, pain her continually, to see him standing in Guillaume’s shoes, to herself be putting him in those shoes: in her brain it’s a sort of nightmare every time. And yet she has to go through with it, she knows she has to pass through that dark night. It’s dangerous, though, far more dangerous for her than for these two men, who will also suffer, of course, but she — she is risking death, or something worse than death.
She said nothing, not so much because she was fearful, but because she didn’t have the words to describe what had been taking place inside her for months now. Had she known what was taking place inside her, she would have told him, no doubt; and, understanding Anna, he would have understood. But it was the first time he had seen her without words to define something, and for that reason, being wholly bound up in his emotions, instead of telling himself that she was momentarily at a loss for words no doubt, as he would have done had he been feeling less anxious, he thought she was deliberately avoiding the issue. For the first time, he thought like an ordinary man and ascribed ordinary behavior to her — he, who had always known exactly what it was she was and wasn’t saying, and was wedded to her the way a vase is wedded to the water it encloses. They wound their way laboriously through the wood, they were no longer holding hands, and when he paused for a moment to gaze up at the top of a tree and she came over to give him a little kiss on the cheek, he turned away and resembled an eagle all of a sudden. Never before had this happened, not once in twenty years had he turned away when she had come up to him. Their clothes, the damp tree trunks, and the stones were black; the rest of the landscape was a dazzling white. When they pulled out onto the road, which they both knew like the back of their hand, he went the wrong way and they drove for miles in the wrong direction without either of them noticing. [...]
[...] In short, it’s as if the whole world was incapable of understanding the distinctiveness of Guillaume and Anna’s love. It’s not the kind of romance you find in a film or a novel, between a man and a woman who love one another, are unfaithful, suffer, and part. It’s a loftier form of love than that, high up on a mountain ridge, as it were, and not contingent on anything, and certainly not on desire, for example. It’s above such things. True, they had made love a lot — and with what ardor, what joy and understanding! And true, too, this had played a major role in their affection for each other. But what really counted was hiking in the mountains together or going to see a giant anthill one day and standing there hand in hand among the rolling meadows. With no one else in the world would she have ventured along those dirt tracks; with no one else in the world would it have given her so much joy. [...]
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[...] What is it she’s so scared of losing in choosing one man over the other? Were she to return to Guillaume — dear me, there’s probably no chance of that now, too much harm has been done — she would lose that promise of a new life which had so attracted her that she had rushed straight in, her dress flapping about her legs and her hair streaming in the wind. But isn’t it an illusion to believe in a new life? Were she to choose Thomas, she would lose a previous life so warm and so tender that it was like being contained in a womb. And yet she had been expelled from that womb, it seems. Can you return to your origins? Not when you’ve been cast out like Eve, weeping, distraught, covering your face in shame in all those frescoes and paintings.
What now, then? Alone in the big, wide world like a tiny shoot? Heavens, it certainly looks that way, especially as the two men are motionless now, not moving at all, while they await her verdict. Neither of them exerts the slightest pressure any longer, neither of them shows himself, yet they must still be gazing down on her, since whenever she appeals to one of them for a bit of contact, just for a bit of contact, he immediately responds. Some of her more lighthearted friends suggest: a third man? They all burst out laughing, and Anna as well: a third man! Oh no! That’s quite enough of that lark! For pity’s sake, no more passion! [...]