Edvard Munch - "The Sun" (1911)
Annie Ernaux on writing (via The Yale Review):
Without realizing it, I am widening the gap between my parents and myself, but I need them, and because of them I’d be capable of many things, as if I wanted to take on all the suffering, the humiliation they’ve been through, and avenge them. It is partly because of them that I’ve written, but it wasn’t the right book. I’ll start over, probably with short stories.
For me, writing would be a better way of being. It’s as if the person I am when out in the world had no balance or depth, as if things were alien to me or, even worse, threatening.
Basically, the only possible unity in my life at the moment would be the true achievement of my long-standing goal—writing for myself.
I’ve had an image of happiness inside me for days: a house full of sunshine, roses, and apple blossoms—and in the afternoon, because that’s the way it is, my time to write, to build and correct. It’s the only life I’ve ever dreamed of.
The role I give to writing is no doubt terrifying, a mode of knowledge, a communication of consciences through emotion, and also something else unknown to me.
Spent all day thinking about the book I have to do, the one that only I can do. If I don’t start it now, I never will. The only thing is that it isn’t dangerous, transgressive, and that bothers me a little. Maybe more than I care to admit. But is leaving a testimony of the life of a woman in a new form (especially that) nothing? For myself, first, for the record, for others.
Every book, especially this one, is a circle around me, and I enclose myself in it completely, until I finish it and come out. Everything I say about the text seems to me like a window through which the substance spills out.
For two years I was crazy about literature, from ’61 to ‘63, crazy, I no longer know how to recall it; literature more real than life (as a student, the daughter of grocers in the rue du Clos des Parts), to the point where I forbade myself to flirt because boys threatened this reality [...] I was living and walking through the streets exactly as if things were about to turn into words, sentences. Nobody in Rouen, at that time, could have been crazier about literature than me. I subscribed to Les lettres françaises, I hunted down new publications in Yvetot’s municipal library, which was pretty much identical to the way it must have been in the nineteenth century (the translations by Nisard!!). In November ’61, I repeated to myself the verses of Anna de Noailles (whom no one knows anymore, nor Marie Noël the Catholic), “I leaned on the beauty of the world / . . . I held the scent of the seasons in my hands.” And that was me.
"Our es mayr im - Mother, where are you?" by Sharakan Early Music Ensemble