The trouble with stories

The trouble with this story is that it is written in terms of analysis of the laws of dissolution of the relationship between Paul and Ella. I don't see any other way to write it. As soon as one has lived through something, it falls into a pattern. And the pattern of an affair, even one that has lasted five years and has been as close as a marriage, is seen in terms of what ends it. That is why all this is untrue. Because while living through something one doesn't think like that at all.

Supposing I were it like this: two full days, in every detail, one at the beginning of the affair, and one towards the end? No, because I would still be instinctively isolating and emphasizing the factors that destroyed the affair. It is that which would give the thing its shape. Otherwise it would be chaos, because these two days, separated by many months in time, would have no shadows over them, but would be records of a simple unthinking happiness with perhaps a couple of jarring moments - which in fact would be reflections of the approaching end but which would be reflections of the approaching end but which would not be felt like that at the time - moments swallowed in the happiness.

Literature is analysis after the event.

Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook

Vaginal Orgasm

... immediately experienced orgasm. Vaginal orgasm, that is. And she could not have experienced it if she had not loved him. It is the orgasm that is created by the man's need for a woman, and his confidence in that need.


Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook

Return to naivety

Paul gave birth to Ella, the naive Ella. He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust in himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook

The mad ones

...the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?

Jack Kerouac
On the road

Who is it?

We pondered it. I proposed it was myself, wearing a shroud. That wasn't it. Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: Death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?

Jack Kerouac
On the road

Submit to sex

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

Jack Kerouac
On the road

Dangerous Delicious Intoxication

I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkenness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility, of danger, the secret ugly frightening pulse of war itself, of the death that we all wanted, for each other and for ourselves.

Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook

Memory

Looking back at those week-ends they seem like beads on a string, two big glittering ones to start with, then a succession of small unimportant ones, then another brilliant one to end. But that is just the lazy memory, because as soon as I start to think about the last week-end, I realize that there must have been incidents during the intervening week-ends that led up to it. But I can't remember, it's all gone. And I get exasperated, trying to remember - it's like wrestling with an obstinate other-self who insists on its own kind of privacy. Yet it's all there in my brain if only I could get at it. I am appalled at how much I didn't notice, living inside the subjective highly-coloured mist. How do I know that what I 'remember' was what was important? What I remember was chosen by myself, of twenty years ago. I don't know what this self of now would choose.

Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook

Savage Tribes Investigated

Thomas Mann, the last of the writers in the old sense, who used the novel for philosophical statements about life. The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy. I find that I read with the same kind of curiosity most novels, and a book of reportage. Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach our so desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it. Inside this country, ....., the middle-class have no knowledge of the lives of the working-people, and vice-versa; and reports and articles and novels are sold across the frontiers, are read as if savage tribes were being investigated.

Doris Lessing
Black Notebook
The Golden Notebook

Unhappy

'You are going to be very unhappy' said Molly, almost moaning it.
'Yes, that's another thing' said Tommy. 'The last time we discussed everything, you ended up saying, Oh, but you're going to be unhappy. As if it's the worst thing to be......'

Doris Lessing
Free Women 1
The Golden Notebook

Cloying mother

He was grateful to her for not wanting to look after him. For not offering to tidy his room. For not being his cloying mother. He grew to depend on Margaret for not depending on him. He adored her for not adoring him.

Arundhati Roy
The God of small things

A viable die-able age

Their lives (twins in their thirties) have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. Gentle half-moons have gathered under their eyes and they are as old as Ammu was when she died. Thirty-one.
Not old.
Not young.
But a viable die-able age.

Arundhati Roy
The God of small things