Whatever

Of course experience has quickly taught me that I’m only called on to meet people who, if not exactly alike, are at least quite similar in their manners, their opinions, their tastes, their general way of approaching life. Theoretically, then, there is nothing to fear inasmuch as the professional nature of the meeting guarantees, in principle, its innocuousness.

His mediocrity is distressing. He can’t stop talking about money and investment: share packages, portfolios, high interest saving schemes … the full set. He’s banking on a level of wage increase slightly higher than inflation. He bores me somewhat. I don’t really manage to reply to him.

The world is becoming more uniform before our eyes; telecommunications are improving; apartment interiors are enriched with new gadgets. Human relationships become progressively impossible, which greatly reduces the quantity of anecdote that goes to make up a life. And little by little death’s countenance appears in all its glory. The third millennium augurs well.

An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best.

You are far from the edge, now. Oh yes! How far from the edge you are! You long believed in the existence of another shore; such is no longer the case. You go on swimming, though, and every movement you make brings you closer to drowning. You are suffocating, your lungs are on fire. The water seems colder and colder to you, more and more galling. You aren’t that young any more. Now you are going to die.

emptiness, the foreboding that your existence is nearing a painful and definitive end all combine to plunge you into a state of real suffering.
And yet you haven’t always wanted to die.

But the fact is that nothing can halt the ever-increasing recurrence of those moments when your total isolation, the sensation of an

Later that evening my loneliness became tangible, painfully so

They went on trotting out the platitudes for a good fifteen minutes. How she had the perfect right to dress as she wished, how this had nothing to do with wanting to seduce the men, how it was just to be comfortable, to feel good about herself, etc. The last dismaying dregs of the collapse of feminism.