MOURNING DIARY - ROLAND BARTHES

Mourning Diary - Pg 233

   Each time I dream about her (and I dream only of her), it is in order to see her, believe her to be alive, but other, separate.

Mourning Diary - Pg 227

   We don't forget,
   but something vacant settles in us.

Mourning Diary - Pg 226

   Maman's photo as a little girl, in the distance—in front of me on my desk. It was enough for me to look at it, to apprehend the suchness of her being (which I struggle to describe) in order to be reinvested by, immersed in, invaded, inundated by her goodness.

Mourning Diary - Pg 206

   The day of the anniversary of maman's death is approaching. I fear, increasingly, as if on this day (October 25) she will have to die a second time.

Mourning Diary - Pg 183

   "Beauty is not like a superlative of what we imagine, a sort of abstract type we have before our eyes, but on the contrary a new, unimaginable type that reality affords us."

   [Similarly: my suffering is not like the superlative of pain, of abandonment, etc., a sort of abstract type (which could be recovered by metalanguage), but on the contrary a new type, etc.]

Mourning Diary - Pg 181

   Exploration of my (apparently vital) need of solitude: and yet I have a (no less vital) need of my friends.
   I must therefore: 1) force myself to "call" them from time to time, find the energy to do so, combat my—telephonic (among other kinds)—apathy; 2) ask them to understand that above all they must let me call them. If they less often, less systematically, got in touch with me, that would mean for me that I must get in touch with them.

Mourning Diary - Pg 177

   Which is what literature is: that I cannot read without pain, without choking on truth.

Mourning Diary - Pg 175

   The very fact that language affords me the word "intolerable" immediately achieves a certain tolerance.

Mourning Diary - Pg 173

   I live in my suffering and that makes me happy.

   Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me.

Mourning Diary - Pg 170

   Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wail till the incomprehensible power (...) that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.
                -Marcel Proust

Mourning Diary - Pg 159

   Seeing the swallows flying through the summer evening air, I tell myself, thinking painfully of maman: how barbarous not to believe in souls—in the immortality of souls! the idiotic truth of materialism!

Mourning Diary - Pg 158

   Leaving the apartment for the trip to Morocco, I remove the flower left on the spot where maman was ill—and once again the horrible fear (of her death) overwhelms me: cf. Winnicott: how true: the fear of what has happened. But stranger still: and cannot recur. Which is the very definition of the defnitive.

Mourning Diary - Pg 146

   No sooner has she departed than the world deafens me with its continuance.

Mourning Diary - Pg 135

   By love FW is ravaged, suffers, remains prostrated, inattentive to all demands, etc. Yet he has lost no one. The being whom he loves continues to live, etc. And I, beside him, listening to him, apparently calm, attentive, present, as if something infinitely more serious had not occurred to me.

Mourning Diary - Pg 127

   From the terrace of the Flore, I see a woman sitting on the windowsill of the bookstore La Hune; she is holding a glass in one hand, apparently bored; the whole room behind her is filled with men, their backs to me. A cocktail party.

   May cocktails. A sad, depressing sensation of a seasonal and social stereotype.

Mourning Diary - Pg 126

   Like love, mourning affects the world—and the worldly—with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from its demands. The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation, etc. The world depresses me.

Mourning Diary - Pg 119

   To think, to know that maman is dead forever, completely ("completely," which is inconceivable without violence and without one's being able to abide by such a thought at length), is to think, letter by letter (literally, and simultaneously), that I too will die forever and completely.
   There is then, in mourning (in this kind of mourning, which is mine), a radical and new domestication of death; for previously, it was only a borrowed knowledge (clumsy, had from others, from philosophy, etc.),but now it is my knowledge. It can hardly do me any more harm than my mourning.

Mourning Diary - Pg 117

   The more the world tells me, "You have everything here by which to forget," the less I forget.

Mourning Diary - Pg 113

   Written to be remembered? Not to remind myself, but to oppose the laceration of forgetting as it reveals its absolute nature. The—prompt—"no trace remaining," anywhere, in anyone.

   Necessity of the "Monument."
   Memento illam vixisse.