An Unnecessary Woman

Ecstasy and intimacy are ineffable as well, ephemeral and fleeting. Ahmad and I didn’t repeat our interlude, never resumed the exploration. He won what he wanted, as did I.

Yeats once said, “The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.”

We lie down with hope and wake up with lies.

During the war in Beirut, the powerful had power, but only those with true power had water.

How can one describe the ephemeral qualities of sex beyond the probing, poking, and panting? How can one use inadequate words to describe the ineffable, the beyond words? Those salacious Arabs and their Western counterparts were able to explain the technical aspects, which is helpful, of course, and delightful. Some touched on the spiritual, on the psychological, and metaphor was loved by all. However, to believe that words can in any way mirror or, alas, explain the infinite mystery of sex is akin to believing that reading dark notes on paper can illuminate a Bach partita, or that by studying composition or color one can understand a late Rembrandt self-portrait. Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one’s walls, even if for only a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.

“They only wish to harass respectable ladies,” he said.

“Are you sure respectable ladies don’t wish to be harassed?” she said. “I don’t know about Aaliya here, but maybe I want to talk to a handsome young man, just a few words here and there.”

He looked up at both of us and smiled for the first time that day, his glasses sliding a little along his nose as he did so.

“If you talk to one,” he said, “you wouldn’t be able to get rid of him. He would never leave.”

In one of his essays, Marías suggests that his work deals as much with what didn’t happen as with what happened. In other words, most of us believe we are who we are because of the decisions we’ve made, because of events that shaped us, because of the choices of those around us. We rarely consider that we’re also formed by the decisions we didn’t make, by events that could have happened but didn’t, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

From Pessoa: “Ah, it’s my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me.”

Of course, like Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, Kant never formed an intimate tie or reared a family.

Among the many definitions of progress, “enemy of trees” and “killer of birds” seem to me the most apt.

In The Science of Right, Kant wrote, “Marriage is the union of two persons of different sexes for the purpose of lifelong mutual possession of each other’s sexual organs.”