saudade..

"....what the boy had felt was something pure, something gentle, something that predated sex or a need for sensual fulfillment. It was the simple desire to reach out & touch someone, to be held lovingly in someones arms. Tenderness is a deeper instinct then seduction which is why it is difficult to give up hope..."

Les Particules Elementaire, Michel Houellebecq



"Huck never returned home from the Territory, as far as we know. Yet captain Gulliver went home, wiser but also alienated not by the trip but by the domestic scene. Unable to stand the Yahoo smell that adhered to his wife and the sight of his savage-looking family, he comforted himself by talking to his horse and finding companionship in the stable. Travel had changed him. You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back. You think, I is someone else, like Rimbaud."

page 493, Dark Star Safari: Paul Theroux





"..she had begun to think about such things the summer before she met Michel, when she was 13. Somewhere in the world there was a boy she had never met, a boy who knew nothing about her, but with whom she would spend the rest of her life. She would try to make him happy, & he would make her happy too. But she was disturbed that she did not have the slightest idea of what he would look like. A girl had expressed the same concern in a letter to the Disney comic Le Journal de Mickey. The agony aunt tried to reassure her, and her answer ended with these words: Don't worry, Coralie; when you see him, you'll know."


monsieur Houellebecq encore...