Abandon by Pico Iyer

Author:Pico Iyer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Spirituality, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780670049608
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2003-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

He had never found a way to say anything to or about her poems; they showed him the person she was most shy of revealing the rest of the time.

On the back, a shorter offering:

Ice inside me as you pass.

The rocks under sighing trees,

Touch me where I weep.

He looked across at her, fallen in some way, and then she was walking out to her car, and there was the sound of the great beast revving into life.

The very next day, and he couldn’t tell if it was circumstance or pattern (a pattern he couldn’t see), he got a letter from the person he least expected to hear from. As if, far away, Martine had been with them in the house during the storm, watching everything that was unfolding, and now, on cue, as reminder or sanction, her letter peeped out of the mailbox.

John,

I got your present. It was kind of you to remember, thank you. The only way I could think of to reciprocate (you were never the easiest person to buy presents for) is by passing on something Madame Duvalier told us at St. Mary’s. When Montaigne was a young man—she always beamed as she told us this for some reason—he met a man, a man who’d written a book called Voluntary Servitude, of all things. And this man, a stranger, seemed so much like a lost part of Montaigne that both of them were rather turned around.

Of course Montaigne was hardly a radical, being a mayor and all that, so it wasn’t as if anything illicit—Madame Duvalier always had problems with that word—went on between them. But each rang a familiar chord in the other. Montaigne felt as if he were leaving everything he knew for some better, truer place which was the place where he really belonged. At this point, our teacher would be shaking (some girls unkindly thought, with the memory of what she’d lost).

Anyway, soon sonnets began pouring out of this stranger, sonnets so passionate that they might have seemed to come from love. And then, after scarcely four years of fellowship, Étienne de La Boétie, the mysterious stranger, died. Madame Duvalier always looked a bit hysterical at this point. Montaigne of course was devastated, and all he had now, he wrote, was “smoke, nothing but dark and tedious night.” And so, with nothing else to do, desperate to keep the memory of his absent friend alive in himself, he began to write. Words came out of him as once they’d come out of Étienne.

Does any of this make sense? And do you see why I’m writing it? French lessons from the Sixth Form aren’t what I expected to be sending you, or, I’m sure, what you expected to receive from me. But I thought it would be what you wanted to hear: Nicki said you felt very settled in your unsettled way.

Fond wishes and thanks again,

M.C.

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