... having been breathed out

Not only had the war changed my relationship with everything, but it had changed everything: the skies of Paris and the villages of Brittany, the mouths of women, the eyes of children. After June 1940, I no longer recognized things, or people, or hours, or places, or myself. Time, which for ten years had revolved in place, suddenly moved, and carried me away: without leaving the streets of Paris, I found myself more disoriented than I had been after crossing the seas in former times. Naive as a child who believes in the absolute vertical, I had thought that the truth of the world was fixed […]

How ill understood! I had lived through, not a fragment of eternity, but a transitory era: the pre-war. […] Even victory would not reverse time and restore some provisionally disarranged order; it would begin a new era: the post-war. No blade of grass, in any field, under any gaze of mine, would ever return to what it was. The ephemeral was my lot. And History barrelled along pell-mell, with glorious moments, an immense jumble of grief with no cure.

—Simone de Beauvoir, La force de l'âge (my own translation, apologies if it’s rough)

[Commentary from January 2014:] In honor of de Beauvoir’s birthday today, here’s one of my favorite, glorious, chills-inducing passages from her memoirs. Coincidentally, it’s also HIGHLY relevant to the Unreal Cities novel I’m working on. Like, to the point where “No blade of grass, in any field” could easily take over from “A Hundred Hours” as the title of the thing… but shan’t, because I’ve already taken chapter titles from that TS Eliot poem. \o/

(On a related note, it is so endearing to me that when de Beauvoir reaches for an example of childish naivete, she comes up with “belief in the absolute vertical.” Oh Simone, you hopeless intellectual.)

[Commentary from December 2018:] oulfis, coming across this in my archiving efforts reminded me of the conversation we were recently having about "those girls before the War" in A hundred hours and "A face in its own right," and that sense of a key event that splits a life into a before and an after, and isolates a person from the world that existed before.

For all that this whole archiving project is a huge pain in the ass (and it is a HUGE pain in the ass), it's pleasing to circle back around to scrapbooked influences on projects which were then embryonic and are now complete, and about which I've had conversations with people. Everything gets richer & richer upon being revisited. The accretive practice of re-reading in action! So at least I'm reminded of why I want this kind of commonplace book in the first place.