Author: Philippe Besson
notes
- The delivery of the atmosphere reminds me of Soseki’s Kokoro
- Double pain: the stigma and shame surrounding homosexuality and the feeling of yearning and abandonment
- Thomas cannot free himself
- The ending absolutely destroyed me
- Betraying a friend and betraying his youth
- Confined versus free, first love, youth, identity, shame, guilt, pining, fate, what if, lost moments, heartbreak, the unstoppable ticking of time
highlights
Momentum too; I feel it. I sense a movement, a trajectory, something that will bring me to him. — location: 173
I can imagine everything. And I don’t deprive myself of doing so. On certain days, T.A. is a bohemian child from a family sympathetic to the May ’68 riots. On other days, he’s the wanton son of a bourgeois couple, as the children of uptight parents often are. — location: 152
This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable. — location: 174
I try to figure out the part that chance played, to assess the nature of the risk that led to the encounter, but I don’t succeed. We are in the land of the unthinkable. (Later he will tell me that he waited for the right moment to approach me but until that morning it had never arisen.) — location: 212
fate In later years, I will often write about the unthinkable, the element of unpredictability that determines outcomes. And game-changing encounters, the unexpected juxtapositions that can shift the course of a life. — location: 214
Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them. — location: 234
He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realize it. He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay. — location: 259
It’s the violence that the words carry within them, their admission of inferiority and, at the same time, of love. — location: 263
I discover the pain of waiting, because there is this refusal to admit defeat, to believe that a future where it happens again is possible. — location: 386
I discover the pain of missing someone. I miss his skin, his body, which I once possessed and then had taken away from me. It must be given back under threat of madness. — location: 389
I explain that in general it’s the likelihood that actually matters more than the truth, that the feeling counts more than accuracy, and above all that a place is not a question of topography but rather the way that we describe it—not a photograph but an impression. — location: 625
desire to merge with his lover — location: 745
He smiles back at me and I receive his smile like a gift. — location: 762
From then on he occupies all the space, claiming it for himself. You would swear that the light went out on everyone else, or at least dimmed. — location: 801
I cannot stand the idea that he could be taken from me. That I could lose him. I discover for the first time—poor idiot—this stabbing pain of love. — location: 841
I had the time to think all the way home about how affairs of the body are so much more preferable to affairs of the heart, but that sometimes you don’t have the choice. — location: 876
I know that Thomas consented to this single picture only because he knew (had decided) that it was our last moment together. He smiled so that I could take his smile with me. — location: 952
Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly? — location: 980
You must have liked him a lot, to look at me like that. — location: 1040
Did she perceive that this selflessness was probably a way of forgetting himself, of putting himself to the test, maybe even of hurting himself? — location: 1072
I also know how much of yourself you have to leave behind in order to look like everyone else. — location: 1081
Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash. — location: 1150
Though my father never reads books, he’s read yours. — location: 1200
he announces that he has to go now, that he would have liked to have — location: 1219
So, your Thomas Spencer, he’s betraying his friend, right? I say: It’s a bit more complicated … In fact, it’s his youth he betrays. He says: It’s the same thing, no? — location: 1217
the act of calling him has the allure of betrayal (we come back to that, we always come back to it) — location: 1236
No matter how much you want to respect someone’s freedom (even when you consider it selfish), you still have your own pain, anger, and melancholy to contend with. — location: 1408
In the end, he remained hidden all his life. In spite of the great departure, the ambitious effort to forge a new existence, he fell back into all the same traps: shame, the impossibility of sharing a love that endures. — location: 1468
It was love, of course. And tomorrow, there will be a great emptiness. But we could not continue—you have your life waiting for you, and I will never change. I just wanted to write to tell you that I have been happy during these months together, that I have never been so happy, and that I already know I will never be so happy again. — location: 1504