Reading The Longing of Edward Cullen Through Marguerite Duras

‘Am I in love? –Yes, since I’m waiting.’ The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.


Sasha and the Silverfish on Owning Roland Barthes - This post is very very beautiful. You may even weep.

Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen in Twilight

Robert Pattinson as Edward Cullen in Twilight

I'm sorry Tanya....  I just haven't found what I'm looking for yet. (MS)

In the last hundred years or so,... I never imagined anything like this. I didn't believe I would ever find someone I wanted to be with...(T 300)

For almost ninety years I've walked among my kind, and yours... all the time thinking I was complete in myself, not realizing what I was seeking. And not finding anything, because you weren't alive yet....(T 304)

You see, Bella, I was always that boy. In my world I was already a man. I wasn't looking for love....___but if I had found .....He paused......I was going to say if I had found someone, but that won't do. If I had found you , there isn't a doubt in my mind how I would have proceeded. I was that boy, who would have ___as soon as I discovered that you were what I was looking for ___gotten down on one knee and endeavored to secure your hand. I would have wanted you for eternity, even when the word didn't have quite the same connotations.(E 276-277)

Jacob: You have more patience than I do.
Edward: I should. I've had a hundred years to
gain it. A hundred years of waiting for her.(E 497)





I wanted to tell you what I think, which is that
one always ought to keep oneself a ...place, yes, that's the word, a private place, where one can be alone and love. To love one knows not what, nor whom, nor how, nor for how long. To love... now all the words are suddenly coming back... To set aside a place inside oneself to wait, you never know, to wait for a love, perhaps for a love without a person attached to it yet, but for that and only that. For love.  I wanted to tell you you were what I had waited for. You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die...(Emily L. 98-99)

Emily L. by Marguerite Duras (Amazon $0.01)

Other books by the French writer Marguerite Duras and film:Hiroshima Mon Amour

Film by Alain Resnais

Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras

.....And we cry sometimes, because we are lonely. And we cry sometimes because the other is asleep and you want to wake him up and read him two pages, three. And we cry sometimes because it is not fair to love the way we do; it is not fair for Barthes to show us how raw we are when we love. And how right he is. And how beautiful the words are and how they make us cry and how they make us love and how they make us want to hate......

sasha and the Silverfysh