Great House: A Novel - By Nicole Krauss Page 0,104

while I was sitting on the toilet the right constellation of words suddenly leaped into my head. I went back to the desk, crossed out what I’d written, and wrote down the new sentence. Then I sat down and began to rework another sentence, and another after that, the thoughts crackled inside my skull, the words snapped together like magnets, and soon, without ceremony, I forgot myself in my work. I remembered myself again.

And so it happened time after time, the unspoken conviction always returned and won out over the anxious uncertainty. And though as the years passed one book after another fell short, each a new form of failure, I remained wedded to an unspoken belief that the day would come when I would fulfill my promise at last, until simply, with stark lucidity, as if a knock on the head had shifted my perspective and everything clicked into place, it seized me—What if I had been wrong? Wrong for years, Your Honor. From the beginning. How obvious it suddenly seemed. And how unbearable. Over and over the question tore through me. Gripping my mattress like a raft, tossed into the whirlpool of the night, I turned and thrashed in my bed, consumed by feverish panic, waiting desperately for the first sign of light in the sky over Jerusalem. Come morning, exhausted, half dreaming, I wandered the streets of the Old City, and for a moment I felt on the verge of an exquisite understanding, as if I might turn a corner and discover, at last, the center of everything, the thing I had been striving to say all my life, and that from then on there would be no need to write, no need even to talk, and that like that nun walking ahead of me, disappearing through a door in the wall, wrapped in the mystery of God, I would live out the rest of my days in the fullness of silence. But a moment later the illusion was shattered and never had I been farther away, never was the extent of my failure more breathtaking. I’d set myself apart, believing myself to be in contact with the most essential things, not the mystery of God, which is a locked and foregone conclusion, but—what else can I call it, Your Honor?—the mystery of existence, and yet now, as the sun beat down and I stumbled along another narrow alley, tripping on the uneven paving stones, the growing horror unfolded that I might have been mistaken. And if I had, the repercussions of that mistake would be so vast they would leave nothing untouched, the columns would come crashing down, the roof would collapse, a void would open up and swallow everything. Do you see? I devoted my life to that belief, Your Honor. I gave up everything and everyone for it, and now it is the only thing left.

It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I imagined my life could happen in another way. It’s true that early on I became used to the long hours I spent alone. I discovered that I did not need people as others did. After writing all day it took an effort to make conversation, like wading through cement, and often I simply chose not to make it, eating at a restaurant with a book or going for long walks alone instead, unwinding the solitude of the day through the city. But loneliness, true loneliness, is impossible to accustom oneself to, and while I was still young I thought of my situation as somehow temporary, and did not stop hoping and imagining that I would meet someone and fall in love, and that he and I might share our lives, each one free and independent, and yet bound together by our love. Yes, there was a time before I closed myself off to others. All those years ago when R left me I hadn’t understood. What did I know of true loneliness? I had been young and full, bursting with feeling, overflowing with desire; I lived closer to the surface of myself. One night I came home and found him curled into a ball on the mattress. When I touched him his body flinched and the ball tightened, Leave me alone, he whispered or choked, his voice arriving as if from the bottom of a well. I love you, I said, stroking his hair, and the ball became tighter yet like the body of a frightened or sick