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A little clock radio.
She hinted around at first. She said, "I'd sure like to have a radio. But I can't afford one. I guess I'll have to wait for my birthday. That little radio I had, it fell and broke. I miss a radio." [...]
Finally - what'd I say? I said to her over the phone that I couldn't afford any radios. I said it in a letter too, so she'd be sure and understand. I can't afford any radios, is what I wrote. I can't do any more, I said, than I'm doing. Those were my very words.
But it wasn't true! I could have done more. I just said I couldn't. I could have afforded to buy a radio for her. What would it have cost me? Thirty-five dollars? [...]
I could have handled it in any case. Forty dollars - are you kidding? But I didn't. I wouldn't part with it. It seemed there was a principle involved. That's what I told myself anyway - there's a principle involved here.
Ha.
Then what happened? She died. She died. She was walking home from the grocery store, back to her apartment, carrying her sack of groceries, and she fell into somebody's bushes and died.
[...] what she had from the grocery store was a jar of Metamucil, two grapefruits, a carton of cottage cheese, a quart of buttermilk, some potatoes and onions, and a package of ground meat that was beginning to change color.
Boy! I cried when I saw those things. I couldn't stop. I didn't think I'd ever quit crying. [...]
to think about: what is a principle? what are the assumptions that go into its validity? how much do they hold up in the face of death
it really hurts to think from the perspective of the mother, trying to live frugally without bothering her son too much, quietly withstanding the indignity of poverty without any real way out or even anyone to commiserate with
[...] she wrote that she was going to leave her kids with somebody and take the cannery job when the season rolled around. She was young and strong, she said. She thought she could work the twelve-to-fourteen-hour-a-day shifts, seven days a week, no problem. She'd just have to tell herself she could do it, get herself psyched up for it, and her body would listen. [...]
this is so fucked up. but also relevant for neil (treating body as a machine, doing your bidding)
My wife moved toward the house, picking her way through the wet, shaggy grass in her high heels. She opened the front door and went inside. I could see her moving behind the lighted windows, and something came to me then. I might never see her again. That's what crossed my mind, and it staggered me.
Now she’s saying that he’d never have suggested such a thing when they were first dating, when he was deeply in love with her.
“It’s a bad sign,” she says.
He replies drily, “You’re out of your mind, you don’t know what you’re saying.”
“You’re always going your own way these days. I don’t see how we can resolve this.”
After making this statement, she starts to cry. But he keeps walking slightly ahead of her. At the next intersection he stops and she catches up to him.
“Why were you so opposed to walking and enjoying this sunny day?”
“I’m wearing a new pair of shoes that I haven’t broken in yet.”
“Well, you could have told me that.”
“You could have asked.”
At that point I stop following them, having already heard too much.
yikes
My beloved stationery store is in the heart of the city, in a beautiful old building built on the corner of two busy streets. I make a trip at the end of every year to buy my agenda, which happens to be my favorite purchase, and which has turned into a sort of rite, but apart from that I like to stop by nearly every week to pick up, who knows, a transparent folder, or sticky page markers, or a new eraser that has yet to wipe anything out. I poke through the colored notebooks and try out the inks of various pens on a piece of paper trampled by countless unknown signatures and urgent, agitated scribbles. I ask for spare paper for my printer at home and boxes to organize my life’s paper trail: letters, bills, jottings. Even when I don’t need anything in particular I stop in front of the window to admire the display, which always appears so festive, decked with backpacks, scissors, tacks, glue, Scotch tape, and piles of little notebooks, with and without lines on their pages. I’d like to fill them all up, even that unwelcoming accounts ledger. Even though I can’t draw, I’d like one of those sketchbooks, hand bound, with thick cream-colored paper.
this is kinda nice and makes me want to go to a stationary store
[also makes me think about the transient nature of these things, how meaning is only ascribed to these objects by the person who uses them, and fades away when that person does]
For five years you tried to be young. When you left high school - just a few days after you started - you were hired at the village factory, but you didn't stay there long, either, barely a couple of weeks. You didn't want to repeat the life of your father and his father before him. They'd gone straight to work the moment childhood was over, at fourteen or fifteen. They had gone, without any transition, from childhood to exhaustion and getting ready to die, without ever having been granted those few years of oblivion toward the world and reality that others call youth [...]
[...] You lived as intensely and aggressively as possible, because you felt that these experiences were stolen - and this, this is my point: there are those to whom youth is given and those who can only try desperately to steal it. [...]
When you'd had too much to drink, you'd lower your eyes and say that no matter what you loved me, that you didn't know why you were so violent the rest of the time. You would cry, admitting that you couldn't make sense of the forces that came over you, that made you say things you'd instantly regret. You were as much a victim of the violence you inflicted as of the violence you endured.
The problems had started in the factory where you worked [...] one afternoon we got a call from the factory informing us that something heavy had fallen on you. Your back was mangled, crushed. They told us it would be several years before you could walk again, before you could even walk.
The first weeks you stayed completely in bed, without moving. You’d lost the ability to speak. All you could do was scream. It was the pain. It woke you and made you scream in the night. Your body could no longer bear its own existence. Every movement, even the tiniest shift, woke up the ravaged muscles. You were aware of your body only in pain, through pain.
Then your speech returned. At first you could only ask for food or drink, then over time you began to use longer sentences, to express your desires, your cravings, your fits of anger. Your speech didn’t replace your pain. Let’s be clear. The pain never went away.
In March 2006, the government of Jacques Chirac, then eleven years in office as president of France, and his health minister Xavier Bertrand, announced that dozens of medications would no longer be covered by the state, including many medications for digestive problems. Because you’d had to spend your days lying flat since your accident, and because you had bad nutrition, digestive problems were a constant for you. Buying medicine to relieve them became more and more difficult. Jacques Chirac and Xavier Bertrand destroyed your intestines.
Why do we never name these names in a biography?
In 2007, presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy leads a campaign against what he calls les assistés, those who, according to him, are stealing money from French society because they don’t work. He declares: The worker… sees the assisté doing better than he is, making ends meet by doing nothing. What he was telling you was that if you didn’t work you didn’t belong, you were a thief, you were a deadbeat, you were what Simone de Beauvoir would have called a useless mouth. He didn’t know you. He had no right to think that: he didn’t know you. This kind of humiliation by the ruling class broke your back all over again.
In 2009, the government of Nicolas Sarkozy and his accomplice Martin Hirsch replace the RMI—a basic unemployment benefit provided by the French state—with the RSA. You qualified for the RMI because you could no longer work. The shift from the RMI to the RSA was supposed to incentivize a return to employment, as the government put it. In truth, from that moment on, the state harassed you to go back to work, despite your disastrous unfitness, despite what the factory had done to you. If you didn’t take the jobs they offered—or rather, forced on you—you would lose your right to welfare. The only jobs they offered you were part-time, exhausting, manual labor in the large town twenty-five miles from where we lived. Just getting there and back cost you three hundred euros a month in gas. Then, after a certain period, you were forced to take a job as a street sweeper in another town, making seven hundred euros a month, spending all day bent over gathering up other people’s trash—bent over, even though your back was destroyed. Nicolas Sarkozy and Martin Hirsch were breaking your back.
You understood that, for you, politics was a question of life or death.
One day, in the fall, the back-to-school subsidy granted each year to the poorest families—for school supplies, notebooks, backpacks—was increased by nearly one hundred euros. You were overjoyed, you called out in the living room: “We’re going to the beach!” and the six of us piled into our little car. (I was put into the trunk, like a hostage in a spy film, which was how I liked it.)
The whole day was a celebration.
Among those who have everything, I have never seen a family go to the seashore just to celebrate a political decision, because for them politics changes almost nothing. This is something I realized when I went to live in Paris, far away from you: the ruling class may complain about a left-wing government, they may complain about a right-wing government, but no government ever ruins their digestion, no government ever breaks their backs, no government ever inspires a trip to the beach. Politics never changes their lives, at least not much. What’s strange, too, is that they’re the ones who engage in politics, though it has almost no effect on their lives. For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death.