John Berger - G.

When Zeus, in order to approach a woman he had fallen in love with, disguised himself as a bull, a satyr, an eagle, a swan, it was not only to gain the advantage of surprise: it was to encounter her (within the terms of those strange myths) as a stranger. The stranger who desires you and convinces you that it is truly you in all your particularity whom he desires, brings a message from all that you might be, to you as you actually are. Impatience to receive that message will be almost as strong as your sense of life itself. The desire to know oneself surpasses curiosity. But he must be a stranger, for the better you, as you actually are, know him, and likewise the better he knows you, the less he can reveal to you of your unknown but possible self. He must be a stranger. But equally he must be mysteriously intimate with you, for otherwise instead of revealing your unknown self, he simply represents all those who are unknowable to you and for whom you are unknowable. The intimate and the stranger. From this contradiction in terms, this dream, is born the great erotic god which every woman in her imagination either feeds or starves to death.

When he answered Weymann’s question: what do you do? by saying: I travel, the answer was neither superficial nor evasive. The constant stranger must continually travel.

For a moment longer her arms hung straight at her side. Out of the window she could see the sky above the mountains, September blue, familiar as the colour of a plate. The Blériot engine was still just audible.

The plane fell fifty metres, like a dead plaice dropped. Chavez wanted to turn back. What prevented him was what he had previously said to himself even although, at the time of saying it, it was unimaginable to him that his plane might drop like a dead fish.

Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.

Her upbringing and education at home, at school and in church has prepared her for the situation she now finds herself in. She must reject this unknown man who is about to ruin her life. She must save her honour. She must guard herself, her womanhood, for her beloved Eduard who has courted her for two years and with whom she will live in the house near the river where he keeps the beehives, and who will be the father to her children who will go to the same school in Brig as she went to. She is in danger of mortal sin. She must resist the evil temptation. In this way Leonie had been prepared. She must think of her own mother and of what she would wish for her daughter now. She, the daughter of her mother, she, the child of God, she, the promise of her beloved Eduard, she, the bride of her bridegroom in two months’ time, she, the mother of her future children, she, the elder sister of her younger sisters, she must preserve her honour as daughter, Christian, promise , bride, mother, sister. But she as I? I, Leonie, what should I do to preserve my honour? I did not know what to do . For this she had not been prepared. In her life as it is she cannot kiss this man. But he is not in her life; he is outside it. I was alone with him. There was nobody else . She will never again, she senses, be in the arms of a man outside her life. It was like a dream . What she does with him is not part of her life — although others will consider it so and its consequences may continue all her lifetime. What she does with him will be the doing of that part of her which is not in her life. My weakness was stronger than I was .

He slid his hands down her back until they were under her buttocks. Then slowly and deliberately he lifted her up. Her feet left the ground. He lowered her, but not so that her feet took her full weight.

She had the sensation that wherever his hands went they lifted her and took away some of her weight. He was putting his hands between her and gravity. She looked up into his eyes, which were entirely concentrated upon her. He was smiling and the gaps in his teeth looked as dark as his eyes. Although she could still recognize the sunlight streaming through the window, she could believe that there was a black curtain behind her back, black like his eyes and the gaps in his teeth, and that this black curtain was being slowly drawn around them until finally it would be like a black round tent. She felt him touching the parts of her which were naturally down-weighted, heavy, pendant, and each time he touched them he lifted them up and took away some of their weight. It was then that she put her arms round him.

His hands, which had counteracted the pull of gravity on all those parts of her body of whose mass — however slight — she could be conscious, had a further effect. Within the mass of each of these parts she felt a force of attraction, drawing it, not yet continually but in broken impulses, towards him and the larger mass of his body. (The sensation was comparable to the obvious one in her breasts but was deeper and more diffused.)

She began to repeat his name.

Any attempt at an exhaustive description of what she was experiencing is bound to be absurd. The experience was central to her life: everything that she had been, surrounded her present experience as land surrounds a lake. Everything that she had been was turned to sand and shelved at the borders of this experience to disappear beneath its waters and become its unseen, mysterious lake bed. To express her experience it would be necessary for us to reconstruct around ourselves her unique language. And this is impossible. Armed with the entire language of literature we are still denied access to her experience. There is only one possible way of, briefly, entering that experience: to make love to her. Then why do I want to describe her experience exhaustively, definitively, when I fully recognize the impossibility of doing so? Because I love her. I love you, Leonie. You are beautiful. You are gentle. You can feel pain and pleasure. You are tiny and I take you in my hand. You are large as the sky and I walk under you. It was he who said this.

He placed her seated on the bed and went to the door. From the bed she held out her arms to him.

No, he said, not like drunken peasants.

The sudden harshness of his words did not hurt or surprise her. She simply waited to see what he would do next.

He told her to undress. She hesitated — not because she was unwilling but because she did not know how she should undress with him watching her. He started taking his own clothes off. She undid the buttons of her cuffs but no more. He stood there on the far side of the room, naked. She had often swept and cleaned this room. He stood there naked. Remembering the past, remembering that she had washed the curtains which he had just pulled across the window, she lowered her head.

Leonie, look up. He sees you. Look at him seeing you. You are being seen as you are. When you were born, before you opened your round crinkled mouth and cried out, you were first seen, not as yourself, but as the alternative to a boy. Their eyes went to your sex — a line drawn on your pink damp tummy — before they looked at your expanding eyes. You were a girl and they called you Leonie. Look, his looking surrounds you. He recognizes you as each mirror you have ever stopped in front of has reflected you. The mirror reflects: he recognizes. He stands naked seeing you. As you bend forward to take off your worn slip with a hole in it under one arm, he sees your two breasts fall forward not quite silently.

Your image covers the entire surface of his body like another skin. All your appearances surround his penis.

You have never seen yourself like this.

Looking at you he recognizes you. His recognition cannot be put out. It burns what it recognizes. And by the light of its burning it recognizes more and more until it is so bright that it recognizes as familiar what it has never seen.