Midafternoon

Reading Bataille had an immediate effect on her.

"In this gathering place, where violence is rife, at the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him."

She read him at first on the couch.

"A philosophy is never a house; it is a construction site. But its incompletion is not that of science."

But eventually the way the words washed over her body, drove her to read him in bed.

"The sacred is that prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of duration, the order of things holds in check and that this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence."

The problem was that it left her wanting to be touched. She didn't really want sex but rather to feel someone hands on her body while she read. Initially she pushed the desire back but found that the desire kept intruding onto the text.

"It constantly threatens to break the dikes, to confront productive activity with the precipitate and contagious movement of a purely glorious consumption."


There was no around in the afternoons to touch her. She was alone. Touching herself was not going to fulfill the desire; not to mention the mechanical problems faced when attempting to touch oneself while reading a book. She spent nights laying awake attempting to figure out a solution.

"Sovereignty designates the movement of free and internally wrenching violence that animates the whole, dissolves into tears, into ecstasy and into burst of laughter, and reveals the impossible in laughter, ecstasy, or tears."

Her husband would not do. He was gone in the afternoons. Tired when he got home, and no doubt would find her desire perverse. Thus the only solution was to find someone else. She found him at the cafe which was a block from her home. He was very young, almost too young to be really handsome. He was a student, always looking for more money, and her offer, while strange to him, gave him extra money for little work.

"The destruction of the subject as an individual is in fact implied in the destruction of the object as such, but war is not the inevitable form of the destruction: at any rate, it is not the conscious form."

She gave him a key. At one, she would strip her clothes off, lay down with her book and wait, trembling. She would hear the key turn in the lock, and then his quiet footsteps. She refused to look at him as he entered the room. He would take off his clothes, and lay beside her. Only then would she open the book and began to read.

"The swelling to the bursting point, the malice that breaks out with clenched teeth and weeps; the sinking feeling that doesn't know where it comes from or what it's about; the fear that sings its head off in the dark; the white-eyed pallor, the sweet sadness, the rage and the vomiting...are so many evasions."

As she read the words, he would run his hands over her back down over her ass to her legs. At first, his touches were shy but with each day, he grew bolder and rougher. As she read, his hands would penetrate her vagina, squeeze her nipples. She would feel him thrusting against her leg. He was not allowed to penetrate her so he would rub ferociously against her body. His breathing would come in short pants but never loud enough to drown out her reading. In the end, he would come into the small of her back. And then he would get up, put on his clothes and leave. She would close the book, put it on the stand beside her bed, and shower.

"TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE...

I have not meant to express my thought but to help you clarify what you yourself think...

You are not anymore different from me than your right leg is from your left, but what joins us is THE SLEEP OF REASON--WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS."