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There was nothing to eat at home, and I didn’t want to deal with the Géant Casino – after work was the wrong time to go shopping in such a densely populated neighbourhood – but I was hungry. More than that, I felt like buying stuff to eat, blanquette de veau, pollock with chervil, Berber-style moussaka. Microwave dinners were reliably bland, but their colourful, happy packaging represented real progress compared with the heavy tribulations of Huysmans’ heroes. There was no malice in them, and one’s sense of participating in a collective experience, disappointing but egalitarian, smoothed the way to a partial acceptance.
why do i love this
I woke around four in the morning, lucid and alert. I took my time packing, assembling a small pharmacy and enough changes of clothing to last me a month. I even found the walking shoes – American, high-tech, never worn – that I’d bought a year before, when I thought I might take up hiking. I also packed my laptop, a stash of protein bars, an electric kettle and instant coffee. By five thirty I was ready to go. I had no trouble starting the car or getting onto the Périphérique. By six o’clock I was almost in Rambouillet. I had no plan, no exact destination, just a very vague sense that I ought to head south-west – that if a civil war should break out in France, it would take a while to reach the south-west. I knew next to nothing about the south-west, really, only that it was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war. Though of course, I could be wrong.
laughed out loud at this
[...] She was a regular participant in gang bangs, usually held in swingers’ clubs, sometimes in car parks or other public places. Although she charged a nominal fee – fifty euros per person – she made a lot at these parties, since she invited as many as forty or fifty men, who took turns in all three orifices before they came on her. She promised to let me know next time she organised a gang bang. I thanked her. The truth was, I wasn’t interested, but she seemed like a nice person.
All of which is to say, these two escorts were fine. Still, that wasn’t enough to make me want to see them or have sex with them again, or to make me go on living. Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature.
lol
[..] On the other hand, it did allow me to sign up for more escorts. I felt no real desire, only an obscure Kantian notion of ‘duty towards the self’, as I surfed my usual sites. In the end I settled on an ad posted by two girls: a twenty-two-year-old Moroccan named Rachida and a twenty-four-year-old Spaniard named Luisa promised ‘the enchantments of a wild and mischievous duo’. They were expensive, obviously, but I thought I was entitled to a little extravagance, all things considered. We made a date for that same evening.
loool
During the night, a low-pressure system, originating over the Atlantic, had moved in from the south-west. The temperature had risen by six degrees; the countryside around Poitiers was wrapped in fog. I had called ahead for a taxi, and now I found myself with almost an hour to kill. I spent it at the Bar de l’Amitié, whose front door was fifty metres from the monastery, mindlessly downing Leffes and Hoegaardens. The waitress was thin and wore too much make-up. The other customers were talking in loud voices, mainly about real estate and vacations. It gave me no satisfaction to be back among people like myself.
He stopped there. I got the distinct feeling that he’d used up his first round of arguments. He tasted the Meursault, I poured myself a second glass. It occurred to me that I had never felt so desirable. Glory had been a long time coming. Maybe my dissertation really had been as brilliant as he claimed, the truth was I remembered almost nothing about it; the intellectual leaps I made when I was young were a distant memory to me, and now I was surrounded by a kind of aura, when really my only goal in life was to do a little reading and get into bed at four in the afternoon with a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of whisky; and yet, at the same time, I had to admit, I was going to die if I kept that up – I was going to die fast, unhappy and alone. And did I really want to die fast, unhappy and alone? In the end, only kind of.
‘Only on the surface, it seems to me. The only true atheists I’ve ever met were people in revolt. It wasn’t enough for them to coldly deny the existence of God – they had to refuse it, like Bakunin: “Even if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.” They were atheists like Kirilov in The Possessed. They rejected God because they wanted to put man in his place. They were humanists, with lofty ideas about human liberty, human dignity. I don’t suppose you recognise yourself in this description.’
No, in fact, I didn’t; even the word humanism made me want to vomit, but that might have been the canapés. I’d overdone it on the canapés. I took another glass of the Meursault to settle my stomach.
I spent fifteen minutes strolling under the arcades with their metal beams, slightly surprised by my own nostalgia and aware, at the same time, that the place really was extremely ugly. Those hideous buildings had been constructed during the worst period of modernism, but nostalgia has nothing to do with aesthetics, it’s not even connected to happy memories. We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we’ve lived there, whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters. The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace.
wow, didn't expect that
[...] Father, father, I said to myself, how great was your vanity! To the left of my field of vision I could make out a weightlifting bench, barbells. I quickly visualised a moron in shorts —his face wrinkled, but otherwise very like mine— building up his pectorals with hopeless vigour. Father, I said to myself, Father, you have built your house upon sand. I was still pedalling but I was starting to feel breathless, my thighs ached a little, though I was only on level one. [...]
oh no
I spent the last day of my compassionate leave in various travel agencies. I liked holiday brochures, their abstraction, their way of condensing the places of the world into a limited sequence of possible pleasures and fares; I was particularly fond of the star-ratings system, which indicated the intensity of the pleasure one was entitled to hope for. I wasn't happy, but I valued happiness and continued to aspire to it. According to the Marshall model, the buyer is a rational individual seeking to maximise his satisfaction while taking price into consideration; Veblen's model, on the other hand, analyses the effect of peer pressure on the buying process (depending on whether the buyer wishes to be identified with a defined group or to set himself apart from it). Copeland demonstrates that the buying process varies, depending on the category of product/service (impulse purchase, considered purchase, specialised purchase); but the Baudrillard and Becker model posits that a purchase necessarily implies a series of signals. Overall, I felt myself closer to the Marshall model. [...]
lmao