رغْدُ العَيْش’s Reviews > I Who Have Never Known Men > Status Update

“Had I become so rich that I could neglect some of my possessions?”

“I read and reread the book. I acquired a perfectly useless knowledge, but I enjoyed it. I felt as if I had embellished my mind and that made me think of jewels, those objects which women used to adorn their beauty, in the days when beauty had a purpose.”

“I don’t know if I still hoped to find an open cage one day, or come across the traces of another group of women or men who’d escaped and settled outside, as we had done – only the traces because, as the last survivor from my bunker, I didn’t imagine that others would have lived any longer than my companions. I thought about it because I

…

“I felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious.”

“I had never sung. We hadn’t sung in the bunker, and afterwards it was too late, I had a lump in my throat. Nor could I shout, I could only produce a raucous croak that didn’t travel far. I do not know whether I am still able to speak. Of course, all I have to do is try, but I don’t seem to want to. And what does it matter if I’ve become mute in a world where there is no one to talk to?”

“When did we know for certain that we had no future, that we would continue to live as parasites on those who’d locked us up, stealing below ground to take our food from the departed enemy? And how was it that we hadn’t died from sheer nausea? She mulled over these questions endlessly, and I listened in silence. The impossibility of finding any answers fuelled the grief that was killing her.”

“Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that’s not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know.


…

“They’d collapsed all over the place, in all sorts of attitudes, without dignity, tragic witnesses to the incomprehensible.”

“The sky was a dark mass and rather frightening, as if it might fall in, and it took me ages to realise that once again it was very overcast.


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“I don’t know what all this may lead to,’ I told her, ‘but that’s what’s so exciting: in our absurd existence, I’ve invented something unexpected.”