Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

Not One Day

bad faith to delude yourself that such a conquest could form the natural extension of a beautiful friendship and not of a vulgar affair? But aren’t you exaggerating your pessimism here? Was your affection for Y* doomed to corruption? Couldn’t it have escaped the fate and faults of the milieu that had borne it? Wasn’t there a margin, an outside, a haven to shield it from the inquisitions, the constraints, the vanities? In that sphere of desire, can there ever be a love story without a plot? We cannot lead a worldly life without getting caught in the web, trapped in the weave of its design. And when we think we have radically managed to escape it—in the frenzy of desire—it resurrects its laws, its comedy, its control. Our desires are overblown— theatrically and vulgarly: dictated and stolen. And so for a few years you have been suffering strangely upon recognizing the signs of the possession of the other. Would you have wanted to be for Y* what the other was for her, whom she seems to desire? Will you ever know? For you do not know what he is to her. At best you might discern what she is to him. Power is without mystery. But in what then does Y* indulge? You suffer perhaps because this specter of power has been emptied of its promise—the bond you imagined between you and Y*— or perhaps all it has done is reveal its vanity. It feels as though you are entertaining

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