From Letter to D: a Love Story by Andre Gorz, translated by Julie Rose.
At the end of the day, only one thing was essential to me: to be with you. I can't imagine continuing to write, if you no longer are. You are the essential without which all the rest, no matter how important it seems to me when you're there, loses its meaning and its importance. (102-3)
Love is the mutual fascination of two individuals based precisely on what is least definable about them, least socialisable, most resistant to the roles and images of themselves that society imposes on them. We could share almost everything because we had almost nothing to start with. (25)
You were the first woman I was able to love body and soul, to feel deeply connected to. You were my first true love, to put it simply. If I wasn't capable of loving you for good, I'd never love anyone. I found words I'd never known how to say; words to tell you that I wanted us to be together for as long as we lived. (29)
Over the next three months, we thought about getting married. I had objections of principle, ideological objections. I held marriage to be a bourgeois institution; I thought it was a legal formality, one which socially tamed a relationship that, precisely because it was based on love, bound two people through what was the least social thing about them. The legal tie had a tendency, and even the express mission, to take on a life of its own, independent of the experience and feelings of the couple involved. I also said: 'Who's to say that in ten or twenty years time our lifelong pact will correspond with what we want in terms of who we've become?'Your reply was unanswerable: 'If you join with someone for life in marriage, you share your lives together and you refrain from doing what might divide or damage your marriage. Building your life together as a couple is your common project and you never finish reinforcing it, adapting it, reshaping it to fit changing situations. We will be what we do together.' (21-2)
At night I sometimes see a figure of a man, on an empty road in a deserted landscape, walking behind a hearse. I am that man. It's you the hearse is taking away. I don't want to be there for your cremation; I don't want to be given an urn with your ashes in it. I hear the voice of Kathleen Ferrier singing, 'Die Welt ist leer, Ich will nicht leben mehr' and I wake up. I check your breathing, my hand brushes over you. Neither of us wants to outlive the other. We'd often said to ourselves that if, by some miracle, we were to have a second life, we'd like to spend it together. (106)
I feel an immense sympathy with Gorz and I agree with everything he says and expresses in these passages. But what would Gorz have done if his worst nightmare were to become a reality?
