Sometimes I haveno difficulty enduring absence. Then I am “normal”: I fall in with the way"everyone" endures the departure of a "beloved person"; Idiligently obey the training by which I was very early accustomed to beseparated from my mother- which nonetheless remained, at its source, a matterof suffering (not to say hysteria) . I behave as a well-weaned subject; I canfeed myself, meanwhile, on other things besides the maternal breast.

This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful.This is the conditionof my survival; for if I did not forget, I shoulddie. Thelover who doesn't forgetsometimesdies ofexcess, exhaustion,and tension of memory (like Werther).

(As a child, I didn'tforget: interminable days, abandoneddays, when the Mother was working far away; I wouldgo, evenings, to waitfor her at the Ubi. bus stop, Sevres-Babylone; the buses would pass one afterthe other, she wasn't in any of them.)