Les écrits d'Etty Hillesum. Journaux et lettres 1941-1943 (The writings of Etty Hillesum. Diaries and letters 1941-1943. Complete edition). Paris: Seuil, 2008, 1081 p.
April 25, 1942. Saturday afternoon.
Last night. I was holding him an arm's length away from me - it was late, and after an evening's work, we had ended up lying on the floor side by side - and I looked at his dear, good head, where the mouth was so aggressive - and I probably said something like this: "You can't, no, you can't express carnally what you feel for each other. And that's why, to tell you the truth, I'm always sad every time we've had carnal contact. A tiny gesture can sometimes say more than the wildest, most passionate nights of love." And I threw myself almost desperately against him. Yet it's not as bad as it used to be. I like to feel his embrace and yet the fear always returns that I have suddenly reached a boundary beyond which there are no more possibilities. I also told him that I sometimes feel more intimately and strongly connected to him in a phone conversation than in the most intense physical embrace. Another form of exaggerated refinement? Yet there are the eternal sources of human suffering there. I don't feel it as strongly in my flesh as I used to, but I am still surrounded as if by a distant echo [of that suffering]. And now this. How can I explain that every time I have had physical contact with S. in the evening, I spend the next night with Han? Guilt? Before, maybe, but not anymore.
Has S. released things in me that have not yet calmed down and that continue to live with Han? I find this hard to believe. Or is it perversity? A form of ease? To go from the arms of one to the arms of the other? What kind of life am I leading? Last night, while cycling back from S.'s house, I put all my tenderness, all the tenderness that one does not manage to express to a human being, however strong the love one has for him, in the great and vast spring night that enveloped me on all sides. I stopped on the little bridge and I looked far on the surface of the water, I melted in the landscape and I deposited all my tenderness in this night, I gave it to the sky all studded, to the water and to the little bridge. And that was my best moment of the day. And I felt that this was the only way to realize this multiple, heavy and tender feeling that one carries within oneself for another: to deposit it in nature, to let it flow under the sky of a spring night and to know that there is no other way out for it. And this is how my day should have ended, I should have gone to bed in my narrow teenage bed in front of the shining surface of the window without curtains, I would have found the trees. –
But when I came home, I found Han, alone and a bit lonely in his room, undressing, and suddenly I said, without much conviction: "Do you want me to stay overnight with you?" And Han immediately, with great eagerness, "Yes, please do..." A human being is an amazing thing. We never know him completely. Suddenly, that night, I came across a slice of naked life in Han's house, which somehow made a strong impression on me. About his little erotic attempts on an alarmed Leonie, we had a whole conversation - in the middle of the night, under the bright blue comforter - about whether fidelity between a man and a woman was not a good worth pursuing, however contrary it may be to a man's innate "hunting temperament." All this, in Han, is so unconscious. Man is simply a hunter, one should not go against nature, and in the end it is not so important. With a man, you always have to get to know him very closely, and you are always forced to realize with astonishment how far the highlights of his life are from what they are for us women, and we women perhaps spoil a lot of good relationships by looking for the essential in what sometimes hardly counts for a man. - I also told him how much I admired S. for his heroic fight against what, in these conditions, one could call his "nature". And Han, in substance: "Yes, but it would be his ruin and he would not be able to practice his profession anymore if he didn't do it". Anyway, that's not important here. At some point we came to talk about such a childish thing as the "ideal" woman. "Yes," said Han, "perhaps we could achieve perfect fidelity, if we had found the ideal woman."
"And where did you find women who came closest to this 'ideal' type?'" I asked him. And then he said - and this gripped me to the core, both by the unexpected turn of the conversation and by that feeling of never really knowing anyone at all: "Maybe especially in the maids. Because they are so natural. You can't converse or live with them, and that's a shame, but I found this 'naturalness' best in them." Han, with his tender blue-gray eyes, which can cast a very conquering gaze into a fine, sensitive face, a face that gradually, and increasingly, takes on the fragile appearance of an old man, but still somehow retains a conquering, youthful look. Something in him that refuses to grow old. Suddenly, I am afraid that he has a lonely old age. And I wonder if I don't have a task to accomplish here, by finding with him a philosophy of life in the event of this solitary old age. But I have to keep correcting myself, to keep myself from seeing others as more complicated and tragic than they are, dragged down by my own complexity.
Han finds life simple and good and the material uncertainties of the future worry him more than the inner uncertainties. But sometimes, all of a sudden, I find him so fragile, so brittle, I worry and feel for him somewhere a deep and protective pity. The feeling of guilt is gone. The feeling I have for him has its own nature, it is well defined, it is not mixed with guilt, irritation or anything else. I have absorbed it into my life, it has become a component of it that cannot be extracted without shaking the whole edifice.
p. 484-486
Monday morning [June 15, 1942], 8 o'clock.
Yesterday afternoon, I suddenly said to myself, "You can't ask people for things they can't give. You can't let your imagination run wild about what someone else should be to you." I think I am asking something impossible of him, making demands of him, often unconsciously, that he cannot meet. Demands that rob me of my strength and disrupt our relationship. I remember one of our conversations, long ago, about sensuality and passion. "You are both," he said, "sensual AND passionate. I, he said, am only sensual, and passionate only in the intellectual order." And that is how I see it. His mind is ablaze with a permanent passion and inspiration, which can go to the point of obsession. His hands and his caresses emanate a tenderness that comes from the soul and not from the body. And as for what remains for him to give, on the purely physical level, to the pure pleasure of meaning, to himself and his partner? - Ah, it's not much, once he's offered himself so totally, is it, again and again. And that's where my demands and fantasies come in. At the moment when he has given all the passion and tenderness that he possesses, here I am expressing in addition a purely physical requirement, I who would like that same passion to spread from his mind to his body and that this body is mine. It is there that my fiction begins and by there also my way of suffering. The body is no longer important to him, he overcomes it more and more and I would like him to continue to find it important. Why exactly? Because I am afraid that life does not give me complete satisfaction? Haven't we often talked about the link between sexuality and self-awareness? Or is it that I don't dare to give up the importance that we traditionally attach to the role of the body in love? Are the points where I have long agreed with him in our conversations and also in my best moments already deeply embedded in my understanding of life? Am I only now arriving at the threshold of a new process?
And the most grotesque part of all this is that: on the rare occasions when his body obeys the laws of his senses, I don't love him as much. I don't even want his sensuality, I want his tenderness and passion. And these - don't I have them all the time? And there are also the most despicable and shameful moments when I suffer because I don't want to share this tenderness and passion with anyone. But I must share it with all of creation. However, my own conception of life goes well in this direction? But one cannot always remain at the level of one's moments of greatness. But there must be a time when the worst pettiness no longer has a place in your life.
I don't think it's that complicated between him and me, I just think that I sometimes spoil things by introducing into our beautiful and productive relationship big blocks of sclerotic conceptions. And perhaps it is a residue of rosy romanticism that manifests itself most obstinately in this: All or nothing. –
So, there is always new ground to be broken within oneself. I have to give myself a few more days of respite, I'll get through it eventually. I will have to be once again severe towards myself and control the excitement of my fantasies and desires, to check their value and sincerity. It is now 11:10. I will go to my little room and kneel in the corner in front of his bookcase - it's been a long time since I've done that. I will have to be strict with myself once again and control myself. But strictness alone is not enough. First of all, we must patiently search for the source of all these agitations, annoyances and useless wastes of energy. But it is not enough to find the source either, a new understanding must find its way into everyday life, come down from the heights of this moment of clarity to prove its viability in everyday life. And now, you are not allowed to spread yourself too thin, as you have done in the last few days, you must now really take things seriously, whether it is about yourself, your life or your good resolutions.
p. 584-586
June 19 [1942]. Friday morning, 9:30 a.m.
"In a man it's a kind of mechanism," he said recently, "in a woman it's a process." That's why the woman has to be the leading and nurturing part of a loving relationship. And in moments like last night, my mouth is ready for surrender, but my body is far from it, it's truly a process. In a man, it is different, it does not go through his whole being, the sexual moment, it frees him for a moment, and immediately after he has forgotten, everything happens faster. He takes faster, sometimes his body has already taken, obeying its own mechanical laws, before he is aware of it. Whereas with us women - let's generalize for once - the moment of abandonment comes at the end of a long process, where the whole inner life plays a role at least as great as the body alone. So we should not overestimate the fact that a man takes a woman. For us, it is the act that perhaps crowns and completes a relationship, for a man it is a moment that is not as organically interwoven into the whole. And we must be careful not to measure his love for us too much by the degree of physical desire he has for us. That desire sometimes follows its own mechanical laws. And his love we must rather seek elsewhere.
For our female self-esteem, the desire expressed or not by the man's body or the frequency of this desire should not be a criterion.
His body will almost automatically react to every woman's body that lies next to his, at home things happen differently. And this phenomenon is, in my opinion, a source of misunderstanding between a man and a woman. The fact that a woman gives too much importance to a moment that, for the man, is far from having as much or, at least, does not allow to know an aspect of his emotional life. I know I'm still expressing myself in a confused way, but for me it's starting to become very clear, so clear that I may get rid of a lot of superfluous stuff again and the way will become clearer and clearer for a really productive work and life. I hope now that one day I will have explained myself "definitively" with these things, so that I don't have to carry them around with me like a ball and chain. –
p. 600
June 27 [1942], Saturday morning, 8:30.
Oh yes - and to return to those moments of jealousy: "These are atavisms, which from time to time rise up in you and which must be eradicated. We human beings have to bear the weight of a powerful tradition, of a fixed set of conceptions, about the conditions that must be met for perfect happiness to exist between a man and a woman. And each individual must in turn break this tradition and these stereotyped ideas through his own relationship, which should develop according to unique laws, made for him. Each human relationship obeys the laws of each person's own possibilities. This is how it should be. And the instincts of possession, the stereotypical ideas of "fidelity", which should be tested first to verify their legitimacy - these are all atavisms that must be eradicated from the self. And one must break the old centuries present in oneself in order to be able to start a renewed century."
p. 630