“(…) I had to come to think that I was different. (…) I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all.”
“This was the first time that I’d ever found myself alone. No woman could see me, and I could not see any of them. I found that very disturbing. I stood there at a loss, contemplating my situation. I discovered physical solitude, something so ordinary for all the others, but which I had never experienced. It immediately appealed to me.”
“(…) another anxiety assailed me, the sense of an infinite void, vertigo, and the fear of falling in this strange darkness, spinning endlessly in nothingness. I curled into a ball as if to protect myself and became aware that I was lying close to another women, that I was touching her.”
I Who Have Never Known Men is a dystopian novel written by the Belgian author, Jacqueline Harpman, a Belgian author, originally published in French in 1995 under the title “Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes”.
I Who Have Never Known Men is notable for its introspective, philosophical and thought-provoking exploration of human nature under extreme circumstances in a dystopian setting. The book raises philosophical questions about solitude, freedom, self-discovery, human condition, identity, womanhood, female body, intimacy, euthanasia, individualism, suffering, aging, degenerative illnesses, the attitude of resignation towards life and the attitude of constant curiosity and independent thinking, the concept of humanity as the need for understanding, and the consequences of isolation. It provides the unique perspective on the dystopian genre, focusing on internal struggles of the characters rather than the external post-apocalyptic reality. I Who Have Never Known Men engages the readers in contemplative exploration of the complexity of the human experience and what it means to be human as well as the relationship between humanity and the meaning of written words and storytelling. The ambiguous and enigmatic nature of the narrative adds to open interpretation of the underlying meaning of the book. There are more questions and uncertainties facing the reader which might cause frustration – there are not many answers but plenty for the reader to reflect on.
Harpman’s novel is an exploration of a terrain between the familiar, identifiable and unfamiliar, eerie worlds and notions associated with them: the bleak existence in an alien territory contrasted with the familiar points of references to the past historical events such as the imprisonment in the WWII Nazi concentration camps as well as the commentary on social behaviour. The events occurring in the world cannot be explained by the laws and concepts of our known, recognisable reality. The ‘otherness’ – [an]other world inhabited by the women and in case of the narrator the otherness felt deeply within oneself is at the centre of the narrative in Harpman’s novel. Many ordinary events are described in another worldly setting.
The narrative centres around forty women including the youngest one who narrates the story. The women were kept in the underground bunker. There were no interrogations. They lived in the cage underground and no woman could hide from the other women. They had to answer the call of nature in front of one another. The guards forbade other women shielding the one that had to relieve herself. They have been kept in the bunker for years, “reduced to utter helplessness, deposed, deprived even of instruments with which to kill [themselves], defecating under the full glare of the lights, in front of the others, in front of them.” The guards would never touch the women and never would speak to them. The women were not also allowed to touch each other in the bunker, no one could pick up another one, or cuddle or console by touch. The women lost their reproductive capacities including the narrator. Suicide was one of the things that was prohibited. The guards wanted to keep the women alive which made the women think they had some plans for them. The women were not given sanitary towels or toilet paper. None of the women knew what they were kept there for and why they were kept alive.
“The outside world was totally concealed from us except for the food we ate and the fabric they gave us.”
The basis for the authority among women was initially based on their age; all women were locked up in the same manner, without knowing the reason for their imprisonment, they were watched over by the guards who did not speak to the imprisoned women either because of the contempt or the orders. The guards never entered the cage and were always working in threes in order to “to prevent complicity” according to the narrator’s assumptions and they did not speak to one another. On the other hand, the guards kept the women warm and gave them fabric to make clothes. For the guards:
“We have no names, they treat us as if there is no difference between one woman and another.”
The women belonged to working class; among them there were factory workers, typists, shop assistants but those occupations did not mean much to the narrator.
“Most of them were not very well educated, and had lived quietly taking care of their homes, their children, the shopping and housework. I don’t think they had much to forget. They started to cogitate; their minds were numbed, and they found it hard.”
Among these women there is our nameless narrator who never had known any other life than the one in the bunker as she has been imprisoned for as long as she could remembered. She did not know the words describing the occupations, moods, feelings, various activities. Her lived experience was stripped to the existential fundamentals.
There is a period which remains hazy in every woman’s mind. Some memories from the time prior to the imprisonment became clearer with time. They knew they would die one by one as they age. The narrator was aware that one day she would eat, sleep and die alone without ever having understood her fate or why this fate had been inflicted on her and her other companions. She was aware that by dying one by one older women will be abandoning her once again. She was surrounded by weeping women who surrendered to the feelings of utter resignation. She could not remember her own mother, but she assumed she had one.
Women had nothing in common with one another, it seems they were carefully selected so that none of them knew each other prior to the imprisonment:
“They took us from all four corners of the country, and even from several countries, checking that fate had not thrown together two cousins or friends separated by circumstances?”
It was very rare for women to disobey. The guards would use whips if they did. Women were not allowed to cry. They had to self-control. When referring to the imprisonments and the guards, the first thought that springs to one’s mind is the resemblance to the Nazi concentration camps from WWII.
“We had understood that the guards did not want to give us any clues as to the reasons for our captivity and our being kept alive, but we’d always assumed that they knew. What if they were as much in the dark as we were? What if they were forced to do a job that they weren’t permitted to understand? What if by putting the same things in all the bunkers, those in charge wanted to keep all information from them as well as from us? I was electrified by this theory; I could feel my footsteps dancing and I began to laugh. I was perfectly aware that I had only added another question to all the others, but it was a new one, and, in the absurd world in which I lived, and still live, that was happiness.”
During the imprisonment in the bunker the narrator is the youngest, in her teens– she is isolated because of her age and constraints imposed on the women. The narrator was the only one who had been a child when they were all locked up. Older women thought that the narrator was locked up by mistake as when their memories became clearer, they remembered that only adults were rounded up. None of them seemed to have any coherent memories that would allow them to piece together what happened. Among women there were stories of brainwashing, genetic engineering and robots so sophisticated that were mistaken for human beings or their situation might have been a result of some Kafkaesque administrative blunder.
The narrator was never daunted by obstacles but very much aware that she was living in despair.The rest of women were not very kind to the young narrator – they felt resentment as they did not know what happened to their own daughters. Women had no notion of what happened to the others. They assumed they all were probably dead.
“They’d had husbands, lovers and children. As a result of being too afraid to think about them because it was so painful, they’d forgotten almost everything. But they didn’t try to shut me up, because they were horrified at having lost their own history.”
The amnesia afforded relief from pain of the past memories, and it was a weapon against fear.
Being alone and terrified, the nameless narrator assumed that anger is the best weapon against the horror she was living in. Death was the only release to escape the situation she was living in. Women were indifferent to the youngest narrator – and she hated that cruel indifference more than anything else.
The narrator spent decades of living with the same women, in the same place. She knew what reading was, but she never saw anything written. She had no recollection of seeing the sun, trees, days and nights.
While in captivity the narrator began to question the reality of their situation and the stories they had been told. She is very observant, inquisitive and an independent thinker.
“But I’m me. I’m not a fortieth of the herd, one cow among the others.”
The only way to record the passage of time was via aging bodies of women. In the bunker, they spent 15 or 20 years during which they became accustomed to this strange way of living in the bunker.
“We have been deprived of everything that make us human, but we organised ourselves, I suppose in order to survive, or because, when you’re human, you can’t help it.”
As the story unfolded the women grappled with their limited understanding of the world outside the bunker and events surrounding their existence.
Due to the inexplicable events the guards left immediately once the sirens started wailing and doors to bunker opened.
The narrator and a few other women climbed the staircase and they found themselves at the top, in the cabin and before them the plain was spreading. “It was the world”. The plain was vast and barren, unspecified in terms of time and space. Women were ‘free’. Even though the women managed to escape they spent the rest of their lives wandering in search for other signs of life.
The narrator only knew the absurdity based on her lived experience, the only experience of living in the bunker she had which made her feel “profoundly different from [other women]. “
This new reality for the narrator was something unfamiliar, different to what she had known. She found out that she enjoyed the physical solitude and does not like the human touch. At the same time she was experiencing the surge of happiness because she left the bunker and now she slept in the open air among other women, her companions. She also learnt “she did not need company. She had the feeling that she’d enjoy being on her own.” Her desire for solitude and independence was strong and unique among the women.
During their quest to find other signs of life, the women found numerous bunkers like the ones they were kept in, with the difference that the forty women or men kept in captivity were found dead by the women survivors. In one case there were the thirty-nine women found dead possibly as the one was removed prior to the siren went off due to death. Some of them “died of grief long before hunger had killed them”. On one occasion our narrator noted “forty live women staring at the forty dead women”. Women learnt they were not the only prisoners. “They were our equals, our less fortunate doubles.” In the third cabin they found forty dead men who attempted the escape. “They’d collapsed all over the place, in all sorts of attitudes, without dignity, tragic witnesses to the incomprehensible.”
“Perhaps one of the dead women I’d seen in the bunkers was my mother, and my father was lying mummified near the bars of one of the prisons; all the links between them and me have been severed. There is no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven’t heard its music, I haven’t seen its painting, I haven’t read its books (…). I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing (…). Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence.”
The women continued to walk the plain and discovering mass graves underground with either forty dead women or forty dead men. All these cabins looked the same or very similar. The women decided to leave the sign of their visit there to let the others – if there were any – know: “in front of the door of each cabin (…) we drew a big cross. (….) It was the sign of Christianity, the religion of our ancestors (…) and it had been the emblem of the persecuted.”
The women initially walked for two years advancing in small stages and then they decided they’d have to stop and settle. The years have passed, and the women built the houses for themselves where they lived in the groups. The narrator helped organise communal life. The narrator was constantly aware that one day she would be the last one. Also, as the women grew older, some lost their memory, did not recognise others and had the early signs of dementia.
As women were aging, they died, some had a gentle death and others asked our narrator to help them die to end their suffering. Over the years the narrator became a mercy killer, agreeing to help other women die when their physical and emotional pain was too much to bear. Within the text there are many deep questions about the meaning of euthanasia, assisted suicide and human suffering.
The women were “trying to survive from day to day in this alien land where only the grave awaited them, but they did not talk about it.”
The narrator did not always understand the emotions of other women. They cried when they talked about the past, but the narrator did not understand why:
“They felt sorry for me, because I’d never experience love, and it was the same as when they talked about chocolate or the joys of a long, hot bath; I believed them without really being able to imagine what they were talking about.”
With time the feelings of resignation started setting in. “The last passions had fizzled out, their hair was going grey, and they seemed to have lost the desire to live. We had survived the prison, the plain and the loss of all hope, but women had discovered that survival is no more than putting off the moment of death. They continued to eat, drink and sleep, while in the shadows, surrender, silent capitulation and death lurked.”
After all women died the narrator was able to eat “with the feeling of having completely freedom at last. I was able to gauge just how much I’d resented having to give in to the other women’s wish to settle down, and I smiled to myself as I thought of the immense journey awaiting me.”
The narrator represents the independent thinking and choosing her own path to follow, regardless of how less travelled that path would be. Solitary existence did not mean something depressing but rather it allowed her to pave her own path to the existence that seeks answers and knowledge about the world. Also, among other women the narrator did feel alone even though surrounded by other people.
“But I was alone. Nobody was dependent on me anymore, and my habits would not disturb anyone. I had complete trust in my body which would demand sleep when it needed it. (…) All I had to do was decide which way to go.”
The book is framed by narrator recounting her story and that of other women as her final days are approaching.
When the narrator started sharing her story, she was consumed with remorse. She recalled her life in the bunker – her memories began with anger. It took her a month to write her story which was “probably the happiest month of [her] life.” She was describing her own “strange existence which has not brought [her] much joy”.
Writing was perceived by her as the act of remembering, the act of expressing her humanity which provided her with its own nourishment. Telling one’s story was the only way to be human and ensure own survival, even though there was no hope for the narrator’s physical survival. For years the narrator did not contemplate the current situation – she just endured the situation without much thinking about it until she was the only one remaining alive and began the act of putting her story on the piece of paper. The power of storytelling depicted in the book resembles the one depicted in Master and Margarita and reflected in the famous words from “Manuscripts do not burn” which serve as a reminder of the power of stories over the oppression and terror. Words can transcend many spheres – can impact the course of history. Writing is the expression of freedom which is the foundation of civilisation.
“Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, I still don’t exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown person who will probably never come – I am not even sure that humanity has survived the mysterious event that governed my life. But if that person comes, they will read them (…). They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living. (…). My story added to their mind will then become part of their thinking. I will only be truly dead if nobody even comes, if the centuries, then the millennia go by for so long that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. (…) As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind.”
By telling her own story the narrator refused to be reduced to the nameless being among the crowd and insisted on ‘becoming’ an individual. She stood against the dehumanisation of the imprisonment in the bunker and then living in the barren landscape. For her living meant something more than delayed dying.
“My story was as important as that of king Lear or of the Prince Hamlet that William Shakespeare had taken to relate in detail.”
The dystopian setting in the novel might serve as a metaphor for desolate universe, monotonous conformity of other women, surveillance, degradation of humanity through inexplicable imprisonment and disorientation in order to highlight the flaws of the ailing contemporary society. The unfamiliar setting provided the backdrop to explore social norms that are taken for granted in our familiar world without further questioning. Given the events in the 20th century this view of the society presented by Harpman is not surprising as the 20th century was notable for the dystopian myths. Throughout the book we observe the bleak, dystopian existence for which no explanations are ever provided. Even when freed from the bunker, the women do not find any other signs of life, all they found was corpses of other forty prisoners. It is worth remembering that the number of forty in Christianity symbolises transformations, testing, self – examination and escape form bondage or slavery.
Harpman’s novel also offers some life affirming events influenced by the Utopian ideas such as depiction of the community of women based on corporation against bleak dystopian landscape, although it is important to note that this is a sort of a forced community and not chosen by the women. They had no power over their circumstances – this is the existence they were given or rather it was imposed on them in the same way that many people are born into circumstances that are often impossible to escape or change.
The book manifests both dystopian and Utopian concepts – it expresses the anxiety of the society on the cusp of millennium. Dystopian setting helps visualise the fears about the unknown felt by the pre-millennial society. It is important to remember that the book was published in the mid-1990s when one century was about to end and the new one was about to start. This was the time of many uncertainties and unknowns.
The inconclusive conclusion to the story of the forty women can be frustrating for the reader – it provides the reader with further uncertainty and the uncertainty can be considered the central theme of the novel. More questions were asked than answered. But one must remember that the objective of literature is to pose questions no one else wants to verbalise and not to provide answers and solutions. The writer engages the reader with questions of ethical nature on the endangered environment, spiritual health and existential unease.
The depictions of women imprisoned in the bunker has similarities with the experiences of the imprisonment in the German and Austrian Nazi concentration camps. When we read the testimonies of the victims of the Nazi concentration camps from the 20th century those parallels are impossible not to notice. In some way those similarities are used as a familiar territory, the event that is recognisable and contrasted with the unknown, dystopian landscape.
Living with anxiety reflected in the various ways the women were dying following their escape from the bunker provides the basis for the better understanding of humanity. The women established structure and various routines as well as rites to exert some modicum of control over their fate. The order was created out of disorder to preserve humanity. Some of them including our narrator had unfulfilled constant quest for knowledge and understanding the reality around them which constitutes a human desire to find the meaning in the meaninglessness.
Other women do not want to share much with the narrator about their past lives in the same way as the novel refuses to provide the answers to the reader. This is the universal predicament for many people – the individual seeking for answers – it is not much about finding the answer as to expressing constant curiosity and desire to look for knowledge.
“I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it’s any use, but purely for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I’ll never be able to use it. And don’t forget, I am the youngest. One day I’ll probably be the last and I might need to know things for reason I can’t imagine today. (…) The impossibility of finding any answers fuelled the grief that was killing her. (…) I was in the habit of considering every angle of the question, and I’d never had any form of entertainment other than thinking.”
Harpman also explores the notion of the real and existential imprisonment. Even if we escape our ‘personal bunker’ situated in the territory that is familiar to us we might often find ourselves in the foreign landscape, still constrained by the social norms and concepts and effectively finding ourselves in the existential imprisonment from which we cannot escape like the older women in the book.
“I was as much a prisoner outside this empty land as I had been in the cage during my early years. (…) I wondered what would make me stop, whether it would be hunger, sleep or boredom, – in ither words, what prompts decisions when you are utterly alone.”
The narrator however is an example of what it means to live with dignity holding to the last vestiges of our humanity even while living in the emotional imprisonment – let not allow resignation to take over our existence even in the most desperate circumstances, even when we are alone.
“There had been so much hope when we’d escaped from the prison, and then this slow dissipation, the gradual abandonments of all expectations, a defeat that had killed everything without a battle. She wondered when it had dawned on us that we were as many prisoners out in the open as we had been behind bars.”
“I felt the burden of the inexplicable, of my life, of that world to which I was a sole witness. I had nothing else to do in it but continue my journey… One day, I would die here. (…) I was sometimes acutely aware that I was alone, and always would be.”
“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. (…) All I knew of him was his intention to die with dignity, sitting erect, apart from the others, away from the pushing and shoving, the fears and cries in which the others were enmeshed. He was a loner, like me, a proud man, and I was leaving, knowing nothing of him other than his final plan. But that at least he had achieved. He’d wanted to face his destiny to the last, and someone knew it. As long as I lived, my memory of him would live too, there would be a witness to his pride and solitude. (…) I felt a profound sadness. (…) I knew nothing about him, but I knew nothing about myself, except that, one day, I too would die and that, like him, I would prop myself up and remain upright, looking straight ahead until the last, and, when death triumphed over my gaze, I would be like a proud monument raised with hatred in the face of silence.”
I Who Have Never Known Men has become one of my favourite books I have ever read. The multilayered narrative poses so many questions and leaves the reader reflecting on them for a long time after finishing the book. I highly recommend this novel. It provides the reader with a profoundly rich experience.
I included below the additional quotes from I Who Have Never Known Men which you might find useful.
On being human
“I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human.”
“I can’t mourn for what I have not known.”
“(…) even though I I’ve spent most of my life with them, I am well aware that I was always different. I’m probably missing a chunk of their past.”
“For a few moments I wondered what gave me my determination to live. I thought of all these women who had been killed by despair well before they reached old age.”
“And what does it matter if I’ve become mute in the world where there is no one talk to?”
“I sensed I was participating in a very ancient ritual [burial] belonging to that planet from which I’d come but which was so foreign to me”.
“One after the other, they were buried under the sky and neither they nor I knew it was the one under which wed been born.”
“Time is a question of being human and frankly how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women?”
“The night goes by, I think of my life, the girl in a rage who taunted the young guard, angry at the present – as if I had a future – or easily climbing the hundred stairs, caught in the web of illusions in the middle of the boundless desolate plain, under a sky that is nearly always grey., to such a pale blue that it seems to be dying. (…) But a sky does not die, it is I who am dying, who was already dying in the bunker – and I tell myself that I am alone in this land that no longer has any jailers, or prisoners, unaware of what I came here to do, the mistress of silence, owner of bunkers and corpses. I tell myself that I have walked for thousands of hours and that soon I will take my last ten steps to go and put these sheets of paper on the table and come back to lie down on my deathbed, an emaciated old woman whose eyes which no hand will close, will always be looking towards the door. I have spent my whole life doing I don’t know what, but it hasn’t made me happy.”
“This world was like a jigsaw puzzle; I only had a few pieces which didn’t fit together.”
On euthanasia
“They were eager to embrace another world which perhaps didn’t exist, but they preferred nothingness to the futile succession of empty days.”
“I didn’t want her to die but how could I have wanted her to live?”
On dementia
“(…) the mysterious nooks and crannies of the memory, she had gone backwards, seeking a world that made sense, losing her way among the labyrinths, slowly deteriorating, dimming noiselessly being obliterated and then fading away so gradually that it was impossible to pinpoint the transition between the flickering little flame and the shadows.”
On death
“Only once did I find thirty-eight, and only once did I find all the women lying calmly, as if they’d understood that death was inevitable and had decided to wait in silence.”
“I decided to bury the skeletons, because I wanted to show that whatever happened to us, we belonged to the same kind, to those who honour the dead.”
“It set me wondering how I would die, whether it would be at night, in my sleep, and I would lie on the plain for ever (…) or whether I would fall ill and have to endure pain. “
“Even if I’d led a normal life, like the women before, would still have found myself at the dawn of my last day.”
“What does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?
“Death is one thing that unites us in experience.”
“I want to die by lying with dignity, like the man sitting between the folded mattresses; I want to be looking straight ahead of me, (…) looking peaceful.”
“It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods and who have never known men.”
“Perhaps one of them had had a powerful influence over the others and had convinced them that shouting, and resistance would achieve nothing, that they had to resign themselves to dying and embrace their fate without putting up a futile struggle.”
“As we went from bunker to bunker, I’d grown used to the sight of now mummified bodies piled haphazardly. However, one caught my eye. He was sitting apart from the others. (…) Had he wanted to cut himself off from the locked door. Had he wanted to cut himself to cut himself off from the frenzied group that had attacked the lock until their very last breath, or had he died last, after dealing the final blow to those who could stand it no longer but were unable to stop living, as I had so often done? (…) He seemed to me to have died proud, holding his head up high, his big eyes staring at the dark passage, with an air of self-respect and defiance.”
“I intended to continue as long as I lived, even if I didn’t know what I expected form it.”
On freedom of being alone
“I wondered what would make me stop, whether it would be hunger, sleep or boredom – in ither words, what prompts decisions when you are utterly alone.”
“I was as much a prisoner outside this empty land as I had been in the cage during my early years.”
“Was I missing companionship more than I thought and making myself into another, a witness?
On the quest for knowledge
“We were going to die one by one without having understood anything of what had petered out. The lights in the bunkers were still one, and I simply couldn’t resign myself to never understanding anything. Where did the electricity come from? There had to be a power station operating somewhere (…). Was it entirely automated? Were there still some people who operated it without knowing why?”
“They were not sure if they could trust their own memories,”
“I’ll move on. Ill carry on looking. If it had been up to me, I’d never have stopped but I could see that others couldn’t go on anymore.”
“I haven’t experienced the things you miss so badly or if I ever did, I don’t remember anything, and hasn’t done me any harm. To me it feels as if I’ve always been alone, even among all of you because I am so different. I’ve never really understood you; I didn’t know what you were talking about.”
“You are the only one of us who belongs to this country.”
“We were doing nothing, we were going nowhere, we were nobody.”
“The narrator often plunged into the habitual speculation about the guards and the meaning of their imprisonment.”
“I want to go off exploring. I don’t want to end my days here, eating canned food, only for it to come out again later.”
“We gave up too soon. We only searched for two years.”
“I was overjoyed at the idea that I was going to be free.”
“This bizarre world that I inhabited was kind enough to add a few more questions to my list of unanswered ones.”
“I read and read the book [A Condensed Gardening Handbook]. 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 (…).”
On bearing the witness
“I felt the burden of the inexplicable, of my life, of that world to which I was a sole witness. I had nothing else to do in it but continue my journey… One day, I would die here.”
On imprisonment
“Having realised that in fact the guards were also victims, I was prepared for the strange encounter that awaited me.”
“They’d been custodian of the absurd, carrying out orders whose purpose they were unaware of , themselves having to submit to incomprehensible rules , and perhaps they had no more idea of our identity than we did of theirs”.
On the meaning of literature and storytelling
“That person will find these sheets of paper piled on the big wooden table and read them, and someone will at last receive a message from another person. Perhaps, at this very moment, as I end up my days exhausted, a human being is walking across the plain as I did, going from bunker to bunker, a rucksack in their back, determinedly seeking and answer to the thousands of questions consuming them.”
“Do I understand Shakespeare’s plays any better, or the story of Don Quixote de la Mancha, or what is going on in Dostoevsky’s novels? I think not. They all speak of experiences that I have not known.”
On feelings / emotions
“Feelings remain a mystery to me, perhaps because the sensations associated with them are foreign to me.”
“My ignorance of human feelings is so vast that they might have hated me without me being aware of it.”
“I am certainly too ignorant to interpret things that would probably have been blindingly clear to the women with whom I’d lived, for they at least had seen the world.”
“I have understood nothing about the world in which I live.”
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