Cplow Esther,
I’m writing to you after reading you a lot. Sometimes with gratitude, sometimes with annoyance. The situation is this. I come out of a long relationship, a cohabitation that ended badly. Really bad. There was a betrayal, and just writing it seems too tidy a word for the mess it left on me. From then on I lost touch with myself. For months I did the necessary things. Inside, though, I was off duty. Just off. At that time a man arrived.
Arrived is a strange word, because I hadn’t called him. Indeed, if I had had the choice, I would have asked life for a truce.
He fell in love with me with a strength that almost irritated me at first. It seemed excessive to me, even not very credible. He told me big things, too big for someone like me at that time. I listened and thought that certain enthusiasms belong to those who have not yet fully understood where they need to go. Then there was a huge fact: he was married. And this, for me, ended everything before it even began. I always thought I knew at least this much about myself: I don’t enter into busy lives, I don’t become someone’s secret, I don’t put myself on the side where another woman is hurt and I say this because, after having been betrayed, the idea of participating in the same pain horrified me. But he insisted. Not lightly. Not with the tone of someone who just wants a diversion. He said his marriage was over, that he would make a decision, that he didn’t want to lose me. I resisted, or at least I thought so. Then, little by little, something in me gave way.
It was almost humiliating to realize this. I thought I had become waterproof. Instead, at a certain point I began to wait for his messages, to miss him. He said: I’m separating. Then he retreated. Then he came back determined. Then it collapsed. Then it seemed that everything depended on her, then on the family, then on guilt, then on fear, then on her inability to handle what she was causing. Finally the separation really began. Only, when it became real, he disintegrated. Now he’s the one who doesn’t sleep, who cries, who says he needs time, who needs to understand. I look at it and understand it, unfortunately. But where should I put myself?
I hug you,
THE.
Ester Viola’s answer: when you’re broke you make bad decisions
Dear L.,
when everything is broken and I feel broken too, I can hardly reflect. Even a minimal control over myself seems to me to be an exceptional feat. Unfortunately, thoughts think by themselves and there is nothing else to do, sometimes, but get screwed.
In those days of bad mood I repeat to myself, repeating the French of lost time in my head, that certain definitive decisions are always made in states of mind that are not destined to last, and so I decide nothing, I choose damage limitation, postponing everything to periods of cooler nerves. I calm down, as usual. And the calm mostly stay still when uncertainties can be adjusted.
Who knows if it’s the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, I’ll never know, in the meantime this is what I feel like doing and this is what I do.
Céline’s sentimental manual
Instead, on days in a good mood I always think that more than Céline in Letters to friends it couldn’t be done, to help someone with the afflictions of love. So here they are again, we have already mentioned them.
Pages: approximately 250. Topic: very scattered letters.
Intended for whom: various girls. Erika Irrgang, German student; N., gym teacher with connections with high Austrian psychoanalysis; Evelyne Pollet, Belgian writer; Karen Marie Jensen, Danish dancer; Lucienne Delforge, French pianist, Elisabeth Porquerol, journalist.
Some friends, some lovers, others esteemed professionals.
Note to the reader: Céline is unrecognizable. It’s adorable. She is the friend who serves in the half hours of discouragement.
Love brought back to earth
The necessary warning: do not hope to find cheap consolations, lyrical pity, sadness, poets’ melancholy, structured depths in the analysis of life’s troubles, cures for love pain that are anything other than becoming a relentless practical spirit, even when you fall in love. Especially when you fall in love.
The unintended result this book tends to achieve is to make you think from now on of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina (and their mother, the gloomy Dido) as unstable and hypersensitive love subjects (we know that hypersensitivity doesn’t help with love). You will end up rereading them with the diagnosis of poor crazy people.
«Love… not love. It matters little. What matters is to live suffering as little as possible.”
The correspondences all begin between 1932 and 1935, these are the years that pass between the separation from Elizabeth Craig (the woman he loved) and the meeting with Lucette (the woman he married).
The only possible definition is: involuntary exercises in literature, the letters are arranged and arranged until they become a personal diary. The use of imagination is minimal: Céline talks about himself, he speaks for himself, even when he speaks to his lovers it is to give advice while pretending to be practical.
Some more, some less, all the friends are afflicted by recurring and sentimental pain. Céline resolves everything with three medicinal turns of phrase.
Love is brought back to earth, tossed around, put back in place so that it becomes a bearable and useful feeling. Of course, it’s happiness. But one among many. Who said it’s the first? The poets? And do we want to believe the poets?
«Dear N.,
She talks about life as if it were a cupboard full of jams and cute little utensils.”
Everything passes, even love
Let’s say it, then, that love is made of the same substance as wasting time. The truth is that the many years spent as suffering lovers will be useless. They won’t be useful.
Needless to say, they have improved us. They didn’t open any account of the experience for us, they didn’t help us. Disastrous loves – starting with that of our parents – have only made us weaker, more distrustful, more strangely inclined to fall in love a thousand times at random because we know, the good time is at the end of a cemetery of less good times. To keep your heart at peace, how much time could you save and put to good use.
People who have had their studies ruined by desperate love, some their health, some their finances. Who has changed residence, who has gotten lost. And for what purpose? Ten years later you say to yourself “but was that me? How stupid”.
The only truth about love is that it passes.
He doesn’t win, but he passes.
In short, in the end you win, not him.
Take care of your health, preserve yourself
She has many attractive qualities, as well as a magnificent and unforgettable poop. But it must become more concrete and ambitious. Think about the future. In short, he must reorganize his life, on utilitarian principles. It’s not pleasant, I know that. But even sadder is finding yourself without youth, poop or money.” And the pain of betrayal? That they preferred another person to us?
«Many good kisses, N. and have a lot of fun thinking about me. You can love many people at the same time. It’s a truth one often discovers when one dies. His good friend, Louis.”
Here is the advice to N. to marry M., stable and solid. «Reasons for hesitation? No! It is clear that she must marry her M. Everything else is literature. His M. will have horns and will not suffer from it. It won’t be the first or the last – it’s all a question of tact and discretion.» Never get discouraged. Take care of your health.
«Dear Friend,
She must not feel tired of her life, of anything and of herself above all. For what reason? It doesn’t have any valid ones. Take care of your health. The life we live is false and flawed and terribly contrary to our instincts from birth. It’s all wrong, everything needs to be started again. His faltering, precarious fate is nevertheless very poetic. If you hold on tight. Write to me.”