Fariha’s Reviews > The Passion According to G.H. > Status Update

G. H. lived on the top floor of a superstructure, and, though built in the air, it was a solid building, she herself in the air, as bees weave life in the air. And that had been happening for centuries, with the necessary or occasional changes, and it worked. It worked—at least nothing spoke and nobody spoke, nobody said no; so it worked.

G. H. was a woman who lived well, lived well, lived well, lived on the uppermost layer of the sands of the world, and the sands had never caved in beneath her feet: the coordination was such that, as the sands moved, her feet moved along with them, and so everything stayed firm and compact.

—the matter of the world frightens me, with its planets and roaches.

How luxurious this silence is. It's built up of centuries. It's a silence of a roach that's looking. The world looks at itself in me. Everything looks at everything, everything lives the other; in this desert things know things.

A whole civilization that had sprung up, with the guarantee that what one sees be mixed immediately with what one feels, an entire civilization whose foundation is salvation—so I was in its ruins.

I, neutral cockroach body, I with a life that at last doesn't escape me because I finally see it outside of myself—I am the roach, I am my leg, I am my hair, I am the section of whitest light on the plaster of the wall—I am every hellish piece of me—life in me is so demanding that if they hacked me up, like a lizard, the pieces would keep trembling and squirming.

My life was as continuous as death. Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages, and we call one of them death. I had always been in life, and it matters little that it wasn't I properly speaking, not what I'd usually call I. I was always in life.

And in this desert of great seductions, the creatures: I and the living roach. Life, my love, is a great seduction in which all that exists seduces. That room that was deserted and for that reason primally alive. I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist

Don't let me see because I'm close to seeing the nucleus of life—and, through the cockroach that even now I'm seeing again, through this specimen of calm living horror, I'm afraid that in this nucleus I'll no longer know what hope is.

I was being seduced. And I was going toward that promising madness. But my fear wasn't that of someone going toward madness, but toward a truth—my fear was of having a truth that I'd come not to want, an infamizing truth that would make me crawl along and be on the roach's level. My first contact with truths always defamed me.