"One thing more," she said. "I'm not ashamed of any thing I've done. There's nothing to be ashamed of in loving a person and saying so."

It was not true. The shame of her surrender, her letter, her unrequited love would go on gnawing, burning, till the end of her life. (...)

After all, it did not seem to hurt much: certainly not; like more than could be borne in secret, without a sign. It had all been experience, and that was a salutary thing. You might write a book now, and make him one of the characters; or take up music seriously; or kill yourself.

There are beings who are overwhelmed by the reality of others, their way of speaking, of crossing their legs, of lighting a cigarette. They become mired in the presence of others. One day, or rather one night, they are swept away inside the desire and the will of a single Other. Everything they believed about themselves vanishes. They dissolve and watch a reflection of themselves act, obey, swept into a course of events unknown. They trail behind the will of the Other, which is always one step ahead. They never catch up.

There is no submission, no consent, only the stupefaction of the real. All one can do is repeat this can't be happening to me' or 'it is me this is happening to, but in the event, 'me' is no longer, has already changed. All that remains is the Other, master of the situation, of every gesture and the moment to follow, which only he foresees.

Then the Other goes away. You have ceased to interest him. He abandons you with the real, for example a stained pair of underwear. All he cares about is his own time now, and you are alone with your habit of obeying, already hard to shake: alone in a time bereft of a master.

Over ten years have passed, eleven summers that raise to fifty-five the number of years that have elapsed since the summer of '58, with wars, revolutions and explosions at nuclear power stations, all in the process of being forgotten.

The time that lies ahead of me grows shorter. There will inevitably be a last book, as there is always a last lover, a last spring, but no sign by which to know them. I am haunted by the idea that I could die without ever having written about 'the girl of '58', as I very soon began to call her. Someday there will be no one left to remember. What that girl and no other experienced will remain unexplained, will have been lived for no reason.

No other writing project seems to me as - I wouldn't say luminous, or new, and certainly not joyful, but vital: it allows me to rise above time. The thought of 'just enjoying life' is unbearable. Every moment lived without a writing project resembles the last.

I have still not stepped through the portico of the camp. I am making no progress in my attempt to capture the girl of 58. It is as if I wanted to 'build her profile as meticulously as possible, adding never-ending psychological and social determinants', too many strokes to the portrait, thus rendering it illegible, whereas I could summarize with: 'Good student from a religious school in the provinces, raised in a modest home, aspires to an intellectual, bourgeois-bohemian lifestyle. Or, to adopt the language of magazines, 'a girl raised in an environment empowering to her self-esteem,' or, another variant, 'a girl whose healthy narcissism has been allowed free exercise.' I do not know if the girl in the car on her way to camp would have recognized herself in these descriptions. They certainly do not reflect the way in which she expresses or thinks of herself, though the words of Sartre and Camus on freedom and revolt may do. [...]

[...] should I adopt the view of French society in 1958, which reduced a girl's entire worth to a question of 'conduct', and say that in her naivete and lack of guile she is pathetic, laying the entire blame at her feet? Must I, as of now, move back and forth between one historical vision and another, between 1958 and 2014? I dream of a sentence that would contain them both, seamlessly, by way of a new syntax.