12 - Fantasizing Juliette

Summary

A dormitory is not a brothel. You must know how to sleep on a regular schedule. Exhaustion has nothing to do with it. The system will wake you up anyway. Everyone's dreams end at precisely the same hour. That's not much of a sense of community – not even if you consider the last fifteen minutes, when everybody is caught up in the diverse metamorphoses of the morning alarm. The most gifted, the most philosophically crafty among them dream that they hear a bell; the more imaginative (because least self–assured) dream of Descartes as a tea–kettle forgotten on the stove. Every time I try to read, it shrieks in my ears. In fact, it almost scalds me, the damned thing. A sad scenario for hard-pressed dreamers. But what follows is even worse: Bordeaux literary studies. A year of being closed up in grey surroundings. The dull and overcast presentiment of catastrophe, always looming and ever-present. A dead port. But to fight it is to succumb to it. Better to feign being bothered by some inner suffering. A mechanical but no less flexible strategy worked out under a dull grey skirt. Oval calves symmetrically divided lengthwise by the fine seams of flesh-colored stockings. (Like sexology, cosmetic surgery becomes more perfect every day.) All these are bitter victories, however, when confronted by the inevitable corruption of the flesh, the steadfast resistance of the perversions – in short, by anything that perfects us by making us worse.