Near to the Wild Heart

"I don't like myself that much that I like the things I like. I love what I want more than myself."

"When I surprise myself at the mirror I am not frightened because I think I am ugly or beautiful. It is because I discover I am of a different nature. After not having seen myself for a while I almost forget I am human, I forget my past and I am as free from end and awareness as something merely alive."

“"Not in my case. Because I never thought about getting married. The funny thing is I'm still sure I'm not married ... I believed more or less this: marriage is the end, after marrying nothing else can happen to me. Imagine: always having someone beside you, never knowing solitude.—Good God!—not being with myself ever, ever. And being a married woman, that is, a person with her destiny all mapped out. From then on all you do is wait to die. I thought: not even the freedom to be unhappy is preserved because you are dragging another person around with you. There is someone who is always observing you, who scrutinizes you, who sees your every move. And even the weariness of living has a certain beauty when it is born alone and desperate—I thought. But as a couple, eating the same bland bread every day, watching your own defeat in the other person's defeat... All this without considering the weight of your habits reflected in the other person's habits, the weight of the common bed, the common table, the common life, preparing and threatening the common death.”

“She wanted even more: to be reborn always, to sever everything that she had learned, that she had seen, and inaugurate herself in new terrain where every tiny act had a meaning, where the air was breathed as if for the first time. She had the feeling that life ran thick and slow inside her, bubbling like a hot sheet of lava.“

“Over the same body that sensed happiness there is water—water. No, no... Why? Beings born in the world like water. She squirms, tries to get away. "Everything," she says slowly as if surrendering something, scrutinizing herself without understanding herself. Everything. And this word is peace, serious and incomprehensible as a ritual. Water covers her body.”

“Pity is my way of loving. Of hating and communicating. It is what sustains me against the world, just as one person lives through desire, another through fear. Pity for things that happen without my knowledge.”

How could she share it with them: it was her second dizzy spell in a single day? even if she was burning to confide her secret to someone.

What counted was that her question nad been accepted. it could exist.

Even suffering was good because while the lowest suffering was taking place she also existed—like a separate river. And she could also wait for the instant that was coming... coming.. and without warning plowed into present and suddenly dissolved... and another that was coming… coming…

The certainty that evil is my calling, thought Joanna.

What else was that feeling of contained force, ready to burst forth in violence, that longing to apply it with her eyes closed, all of it, with the rash confidence of a wild beast? Wasn't it in evil alone that you could breathe fearlessly, accepting the air and your lungs? Not even pleasure would give me as much pleasure as evil, she thought surprised. She felt a perfect animal inside her, full of contradictions, of selfishness and vitality.

Even from a distance she possessed things.

She had recently learned to braid. She went over to the little table where the books were, played with them by looking at them from a distance.

...the precious and precise harmony between expression and substance.

Eternity wasn't just a time, but something like the deeply rooted certainty that she couldn't contain it in her body because of death; the impossibility of going beyond eternity was eternity; and a feeling in absolute, almost abstract purity was also eternal. What really gave her a sense of eternity was the impossibility of knowing how many human beings would succeed her body, which would one day be far from the present with the speed of a shooting star.

I look through this window and the only truth, the truth I couldn't tell that man, if I went up to him, without him running away from me, the only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live.

You lie and stumble into the truth. Even in her freedom, when she chose new paths, she later recognized them. To be free was to carry on after all and there again was the beaten track.

She went to places where men and women met. Everyone said: fortunately she has woken up, life is short, one needs to make the most of it, she used to lackluster, now she is somebody. No one knew she was being so unhappy that she needed to go looking for life.