Immortality

Je crois que ce n’était pas Lou Salomé que vous désiriez, mais bien quelqu’un comme elle. » Devant le silence de Nietzsche, Breuer insista : « Je n’oublierai jamais notre promenade au Simmeringer Haide ; elle a bouleversé ma vie par bien des aspects. De toutes les choses que j’ai apprises ce jour-là, celle qui m’a le plus marqué, je crois, c’est d’

“For the truth is,” wrote José Ortega y Gasset, “that life on the face of it is a chaos in which one finds oneself lost. The individual suspects as much but is terrified to encounter this frightening reality face to face, and so attempts to conceal it by drawing a curtain of fantasy over it, behind which he can make believe that everything is clear

My goal first of all is to get at the truth of those years. Of those days. Without sham feelings. Just after the war this woman would have told of one war; after decades, of course, it changes somewhat, because she adds her whole life to this memory. Her whole self. How she lived those years, what she read, saw, whom she met. Finally, whether she i

She would say, though, that the blurred boundaries were precisely the point, that it’s exactly in that place of orgasmic bliss or, sometimes, sheer terror where the stuff we normally keep repressed floats to the surface, ripe for transformation.