Paragraphs from THE LOVER,by MARGUERITE DURAS

The story of my life doesn't exist. Doesn't exist. There's never any centre to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true. There was no one.

Before, I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I am talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried. I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. Writing, for those people, was still something moral. Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realize that if writing isn't, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it's nothing. That if it's not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement. But usually I have no opinion, I can see that all options are open now, that there seem to be no more barriers, that writing seems at a loss for somewhere to hide, to be written, to be read. That its basic unseemliness is no longer accepted.

I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it already existed in me. I knew it the same as other people, but strangely, in advance.

That was how everything started for me—with that flagrant, exhausted face, those rings around the eyes, in advance of time and experience.

She's slim, tall, drawn in Indian ink, an engraving. People stop and look in amazement at the elegance of this foreigner who walks along unseeing. Like a queen. People never knew at first where she's from. And then they think she can only be from somewhere else, from there. Because of this she's beautiful. She's dressed in old European clothes, scraps of brocade, out-of-date old suits, old curtains, old oddments, old models, moth-eaten old fox furs, old otter skins, that's her kind of beauty, tattered, chilly, plaintive and in exile, noting suits her, everything's too big, and yet it looks marvelous. She's made in such a way, face and body, that anything that touches her shares immediately and infallibly in her beauty.