Orlanda

The things I have never told anyone absolutely define me and isolate me, the things that I alone know about myself guarantee my boundaries. Here, this is me, there, is everybody else, the people who do not know the things I have never confessed.

Don't we all go through life in the same ignorance of who we are, ready to rush at any description of ourselves that would give us the illusion of having a simple identity that can be summed up in a few words?

The destiny of daughters burdened with an impossible mother is tragic. When they manage to develop a healthy indifference, people say they are heartless, and when they are devoted, people say they are masochists.

To understand the ties that attach us to each other, we only have a very limited number of models: so me to me? We approve or disapprove of ourselves, we love or hate ourselves, we do not have any more power over ourselves than over others, it is the same struggle that confronts us, victors or vanquished, with our external enemies and our inner contradictions.

Between the day that has just ended and the one that is about to begin there is a moment of absolute suspense. I awaken and perhaps I no longer know who I am nor who is asleep beside me, so I quickly invent a name, a story in which to pour my anguish. I construct an identity, but how can I be sure that today's is truly the same as yesterday's, or that the world exists?

Animula vagula blandula, each one of us, little wandering souls seeking a share of happiness and always disappointed, as we go from dawn to dawn, our hearts torn, brave and pathetic, desperately trying to behave with the dignity required by our human condition.

I am everything mummy didn't want you to be. Each time you sensed her disapproval, you were afraid and you gave up, you wanted to remove whatever displeased her from yourself.

Orlanda contained everything her mother had disapproved of when she was twelve. Today, she is her own judge. On leaving, Orlanda had taken away the terrible You're such a tomboy! which had torn her and which he had made his identity.

Our century abounds in intense, lengthy discussions on the question of identity, a name and surname are not enough. The debate reaches such remarkable levels of subtlety that it is sometimes difficult to follow. When we say I, who do we mean? If someone else can say that he is me, where is me, here or there? Each of us is absolutely convinced that we are ourselves, and we rely on that assurance for our stability.

It was I who drank the chocolate that had been made for my little cousin, broke the jug, finished off the jar [...] I wanted to create a barrier between myself and others, define my territory, say here, in this place, the only place in the world where it is known with absolute certainty who drank the chocolate. Here, is me.

Is it possible to be so unaware of what drives us? Or is it tremendously naive to believe that we know where we are going?

Her thick, unruly hair was tamed by excellent hairdressers, she learned to handle objects without breaking her nails and ideas without causing ructions. She liked to please, and that is what kills the boy within the girl.

Behind the words whose deeper meaning eludes her weaves another train of thought like the hidden meanders of intermittent rivers—so called because they flow in the open for a while and then disappear underground. People think that is where they end, but they reappear a few miles further on.

Suddenly confronted with a part of herself that she did not know, she hesitates briefly, finds it to her liking and joyfully adopts it? Are our principles, our rules, our convictions, everything we believed to be governed by reason, only the product of obsolete docility?

Her father had laughed, but Marie Berger wondered whether it was proper to make fun of Victor Hugo. Hadn't he been a member of the Académie Française?