The Passion According to G.H. Read Online Free PDF Page A

generosity and grace, and one who isn’t a bother, and one who doesn’t eat away at a man: a woman who smiles and laughs. I respect other people’s pleasure, and delicately I consume my own pleasure, tedium nourishes me and delicately consumes me, the sweet tedium of a honeymoon.
    That image of myself in quotes satisfied me, and not just superficially. I was the image of what I was not, and that image of not-being overwhelmed me: one of the most powerful states is being negatively. Since I didn’t know what I was, “not being” was the closest I could get to the truth: at least I had the other side: I at least had the “not,” I had my opposite. I didn’t know what was good for me, so I lived a kind of pre-eagerness for my “bad.”
    And living my “bad,” I lived the other side of something I couldn’t even manage to want or attempt. Like somebody who follows with love a life of whoredom, and at least has the opposite of what she doesn’t know or want or have: the life of a nun. Only now do I know that I already had it all, though the other way around: I was devoted to every detail of the not. Painstakingly not being, I was proving to myself that — that I was.
    That way of not-being was so much more pleasant, so much cleaner: since, without meaning this ironically, I’m a woman of spirit. And with a spirited body. At the breakfast table I was framed by my white robe, my clean and well-sculpted face, and a simple body. I exuded the kind of goodness that comes from indulging one’s own pleasures and those of others. I ate delicately what was mine, and delicately wiped my mouth with the napkin.
    This her, G. H. in the leather of her suitcases, was I: is it I — still? No. I immediately figure that the hardest thing my vanity will have to face is the judgment of myself: I’ll have every appearance of a failure, and only I will know if that was the failure I needed.

Only I will know if that was the failure I needed.
    I finally got up from the breakfast table, that woman. Not having a maid that day would give me the type of activity I wanted: arranging. I always liked to arrange things. I guess it’s my only real vocation. By putting things in order, I create and understand at the same time. But since I gradually, through reasonably good investments, became fairly well-off, that hampered me in my ability to use this vocation of mine: if money and education hadn’t put me in the class I belong to, I’d normally have worked as the maid who arranges things in a large home of rich people, where there is so much to arrange. Arranging is finding the best form. If I’d been a maid-arranger, I wouldn’t have even needed the amateurism of sculpture; if with my hands I’d been able to arrange things for hours on end. To arrange the form?
    The always forbidden pleasure of arranging a house was so great that, still sitting at the table, I was already savoring the feeling in the mere planning of it. I looked around the apartment: where would I begin?
    And also so that afterward, in the seventh hour as on the seventh day, I would be free to rest and enjoy the calm remainder of the day. Almost joyless calm, which would be a good balance for me: the hours doing sculpture taught me almost joyless calm. The week before I’d had too much fun, gone out too much, had too much of everything I wanted, and now I wished for a day exactly like the one this one promised to be: heavy and good and empty. I’d stretch it out as long as possible.
    Maybe I’d start cleaning at the back of the apartment: the maid’s room must be filthy, given its dual roles as a sleeping space and storage room for old clothes, suitcases, ancient newspapers, wrapping paper and leftover twine. I’d clean and ready it for the new maid. Then, from the back, I’d slowly “climb” horizontally until I reached the opposite end of the apartment which was the living room, where — as if I myself were the finish line of the arrangements and of the morning