Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 545

Whether you experienced the passion of desire I have, of course, no way of knowing, nor indeed have I wished with even the most fleeting fragment of a wish to know, for the fact that one constitutes by one's mere existence so to speak the proof of some sort of passion makes any speculation upon this part of one's parents' experience more immodest, more scandalizing, more deeply unwelcome than an obscenity from a stranger.

I recoil from the very thought.

At the same time, I am aware that my recoil could be interpreted by readers of the tea leaves at the bottom of my psyche as an incestuous sign, since theirs is a science of paradox: if one hates, they say it is because one loves ; ;

if one bullies, they say it is because one is afraid ; ;

if one shuns, they say it is because one desires ; ;

and according to them, whatever one fancies one feels, what one feels in fact is the opposite.

Well, normally abnormal or normally normal, neurotic or merely fastidious ( do the tea-leaf readers, by the way, allow psyches to have moral taste??

), I have never wanted to know what you knew of passion.