without the gnashing my teeth.
I felt that what I valued most about sex was temperance, and that this was ebbing away without me being able to do anything about it.
Now, as I recount these things that happened long ago, I am no longer afraid of spring. Painful answers have come to me, answers that have stifled the muffled revolt. Now, I wait for spring with the virile nostalgia that averted crises lend one, with the quiet, restrained sadness that comes from solitude. I now understand that what tormented me was not spring, but something else. I was afraid not of the torrents that coursed through my blood, consuming me, exhausting me, but of the new soul that was secretly taking shape. I was afraid to replace my own decisions with mediocre, but gratifying, decisions that I would regret in later, sad years. With Nonora, I was not afraid of her body, which I ached to clasp in my arms, to hold to my chest. I was afraid of becoming stupid and brutish through mendacious sentimentalism, time wasting, and my transformation into one of those countless, perfect tools of love, a perfumed, groomed, witty poseur.
In spring I was not afraid of the life of the flesh, of the brain, or of the soul. I understood that the fate of the sensitive soul is to suffer and that of the brain is to succumb to senility. I understood that flesh is doomed to insatiable desire interrupted only by disgust. I understood all of these things and was glad no one else seemed to think about them.
In spring I could fall in love with a creature that in winter or autumn would have remained simply a friend. Why should I love only at the command of the sky, the cherry blossoms, and the lilacs? Why be deceived? Why must I wait? Waiting for love and for spring humiliated me even more than all the desires stifling my breath and boiling my blood. To wait is a feminine attitude. I felt as passive and pensive as a sentimental virgin waiting, resigned, for her master to pick her. This defeat humiliated me deeply.
Springs past, and springs future: I no longer fear them. And here I am, writing, unbeknownst to anyone, in a notebook that I conceal among boxes of research notes. Here I am, writing in the middle of autumn. And how no one will be able to know whether I am sad.
And I am not sad, either about autumn or this account of my memories.
SEVEN: WORKS AND DAYS
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