Читать книгу Exercises in Loneliness. Unfinished Essays - Julie Delvaux - Страница 5

A few pearls of wisdom from the Memoirs by Casanova:

“My errors will point to thinking men the various roads, and will teach them the great art of treading on the brink of the precipice without falling into it. It is only necessary to have courage, for strength without self-confidence is useless.”

“As for the deceit perpetrated upon women, let it pass, for, when love is in the way, men and women as a general rule dupe each other.”

(Casanova knew this better than anyone: his affair with La Charpillon (Marie Anne Auspurgher) was a fascinating, if impossibly bitter, case of deceit perpetrated by a woman upon a man. The “affair” which was never consummated and which cost Casanova 2,000 guineas culminated in a “journée du dupe”, when Casanova was denied access to La Charpillon under the pretext that she was dying. Inconsolable, he decided to throw himself in the Thames but was talked out of it by a friend who happened to pass by. Together, they went to the Ranelagh Gardens where Casanova saw his expensive darling dancing, offensively healthy and beautiful.)

Also, to carry on expanding on the phrase by Huysmans:

“There is only one reason for literature to exist, to save those who write it from the tedium of living”,

here are a couple of extracts from Casanova’s Memoirs that quite potently prove the Frenchman’s point:

“I have written the story of my life,.. but am I wise in throwing it before a public of which I know nothing but evil? No, I am aware it is sheer folly, but I want to be busy, I want to laugh, and why should I deny myself this gratification?… By recollecting the pleasures I have had formerly, I renew them, I enjoy them the second time, while I laugh at the remembrance of times now past, and which I no longer feel”.

Indeed, for the man who had been to many countries and places and had known (literally, as figuratively, speaking) many people, to find himself as a librarian in an old chateau in Dux must have been frustrating, especially as his health also began to deteriorate. With nothing interesting happening around him in the chateau his only resort was his own past, which thought he captured with the well-known “my life is my subject, and my subject is my life”.

[The quotes are from the unabridged English translation of Casanova’s Memoirs (London, 1894)].

When we state that we are happy being lonely we dupe ourselves. I have just stated that loneliness can become a habit, and you can object to acquiring it, like Casanova. But I sincerely doubt that any person would genuinely wish to remain alone forever. Robinson Crusoe found himself a Friday, and we inevitably ascribe anthropomorphic traits to our otherwise solitary world. Whether we cherish books or pets, we turn them into something we would not want to lose, an undeniably human extension of ourselves.

The reader would certainly want to know how it happened that I started thinking and writing about loneliness. I went through a stage of wanting to be alone in my early teens, which may be familiar to many. Some early poems on this subject included the one with rather telling lines:

I love solitude,

I pray for it,

I don’t ask for my days to be long

But I want to be united with her.

This is a verbatim translation, so don’t be misled by “her”: it was a reference to Soul, which is a feminine-gender noun in Russian. In hindsight, this was how I expressed a desire to gain inner comfort. This was the voice of a youngster searching for peace and love in early 1990s.

As I grew older and went to the university, I started getting torn between the inner comfort that came with studies and a feeling that I wanted to be one half of a pair. Moreover, I was determined that my family life would be full of passion or even Passions – a far cry from comfort and peace, as you can imagine. At the beginning of 2000s I read a few interviews with celebrities who claimed their family was their “peaceful haven”. I found the expression alarming, as it oozed that particular bourgeois boredom I wanted to escape. I was convinced, as a true romantic, that love had to have some challenges. It could therefore be tumultous, hot, problematic – anything, as long as it didn’t embody “the tedium of living”. I hadn’t read Hyusmans yet, by the way.

As with independence, I got what I asked for, and even more. I had a seemingly peaceful haven that more often than not looked like a teacup, overtaken by a storm.

My first reaction was to find solace in the familiar idea of a hermit’s life. By then, however, I had learned to reason, and various experiences convinced me that I was a very capable person. It just didn’t make sense that I couldn’t have a normal family life. It was then that I began to deconstruct the debris of my own conflicting views on marriage and peoples’s relationships.

In the end, I admitted that I also wanted to live in a peaceful haven. I discovered that life outside your abode was rather unpredictable, and therefore the only place where you could gain confidence and strength to carry on was your family and your home. It had to be the first and the last place where you would turn for support, solace and determination.

Of course, it is possible to gain these from yourself, and some of us get quite good at it. But, believe me, it is the most wonderful thing when your near and dear believe in you, when they look up at you and proudly share your example with others.

I somewhat willingly got back to living alone. I know it won’t last forever. As an historian, I believe in cycles, so waiting doesn’t hurt. The French author, of whom I am to write more in the next chapter, wrote in one of his works: il y a un plaisir non pas d`être seule mais d`être capable de l`être (there is a pleasure not in being alone but in being capable of it). I agree, yet the topic, generously fed by personal experience, couldn’t help but fascinate me. I wanted to think why people craved loneliness, and what they did after they obtained the inner comfort that arguably comes with it. I had a feeling that leading a solitary existence, with little socialising and not caring for anyone, could not be fulfulling in the long run. After a period of evolutionary development people usually need some sort of a revolution because, well, you know, we all want to change the world (The Beatles).