The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out. Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune. I am a wretched man, a crippled recluse. I am afraid of death; I love, and, in different ways, I suffer: Then I abandon my sorrows and I say that they lie. Outside It IS cold. I don't know why I am burning in my bed: I have no fire, it's freezing. If I were naked outside, struck down, halted, lost (I would hear better than in my room the whistlings and detonations of bombs-just now the town is being bombed), the chattering of my teeth would still lie. I undressed so many women at the brothel. I drank, I was intoxicated and was happy only if I was indefensible. The freedom one has only at the brothel ... At the brothel I could take off my pants, sit on the assistant madam's knees and cry. That was of no consequence either, was only a lie, exhausting the miserable possibilities nonetheless.
I have a puerile, honest idea of my rear end, and so much fear at bottom. A mixture of horror, unhappy love, and lucidity (the owl!) ... Like a lunatic escaped from an asylum, my madness at least still confines me. My delirium is convulsed. I don't know if I laugh at the night, or if the night ... I am alone, and, without B., I cry out. My cry gets lost in the same way that life is lost in death. Obscenity exacerbates love. A frightened memory of B. naked under the eyes of A. I embraced her desperately and our mouths intermingled.
A., excited, kept quiet, "It was like being in church ". And now? I love B. so much that I love her absence, so much that in her I love my anguish. My weakness: to burn, to laugh, to exult, but when the cold comes, to lack the courage to live. The worst: so many indefensible lives-so much vanity, ugliness, and moral emptiness. That woman with the double chin whose immense turban proclaimed the rule of error . ... The crowd-stupidity, failure-on the whole isn't it a mistake? the fall of being in the individual, of the individual in the crowd, isn't it, in our darkness, an "anything rather than "? The worst would be God: rather
Madame Charles exclaiming, "My goodness, it's the love of a little darling! " –rather myself in bed with Madame Charles, but the rest of the night sobbing: condemned to want the impossible. In that regard, the tortures, the pus, the sweat, the ignominy. A whole deathlike activity for paltry results. In this maze of helplesssness (delusion on all sides), I forget the moment when the curtain rises (N. raising the dress, E. laughing in the mirror: I rushed over, took the mouth and the breasts sprang from the dress .. . ). E.'s nakedness . . . , B.'s nakedness, will you deliver me from anguish?
But no... give me more anguish . . .
The Impossible,
Georges Bataille
