Foe

But this is not a place of words. Each syllable, as it comes out, is caught and filled with water and diffused. This is a place where bodies have their own signs. It is the home of Friday.

Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering.

Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe. That is my entreaty.

Would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory, he no longer knew for sure what truth, what fancy.

Seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beast he has slain.

To me the moral is that he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force. I mean the executioner and his assistants, both great and small. If I were the Irish woman, I should rest most uneasy in my grave knowing to what interpreter the story of my last hours has been consigned.

This is the place where bodies are their own signs.

I would rather be the author of my story than have lies told about me.

Perhaps they wanted to prevent him from ever telling his story, who he was, where his home lay, how it came about that he was taken.

The stranger (who was of course the Cruso I told you of).

A being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso.

To hold us in check when our desires grow immoderate. As long as our desires are moderate we have no need of laws.

In a sea of fallen leaves we sit, she and I, two substantial beings.

If Providence were to watch over all of us,” said Cruso, “who would be left to pick the cotton and cut the sugar cane? For the business of the world to prosper, Providence must sometimes wake and sometimes sleep, as lower creatures do.”

But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place: a great rocky hill with a flat top, rising sharply from the sea on all sides except one, dotted with drab bushes that never flowered and never shed their leaves.

He is the child of his silence.

At last I could row no further.

At last I could row no further. My hands were blistered, my back was burned, my body ached. With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped overboard. With slow strokes, my long hair floating about me, like a flower of the sea, like an anemone, like a jellyfish of the kind you see in the waters of Brazil, I swam towards the strange island, for a while swimming as I had rowed, against the current, then all at once free of its grip, carried by the waves into the bay and on to the beach.

I tell myself I talked to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will.

Cannibals are no less dull than Englishmen.

You will believe me when I say the life we lead grows less and less distinct from the life we lead on Cruso’s island. Sometimes I wake up not knowing where I am. The world is full of islands, said Cruso once. His words ring truer every day.

“You are father-born. You have no mother. The pain you feel is the pain of lack, not the pain of loss. What you hope to regain in my person you have in truth never had.”

I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story.

When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who came, the one who witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: of being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso.

I do not love him, but he is mine.

I ask you to remember, not every man who bears the mark of a castaway is a castaway at heart

To live in silence is to live like the whales.

It is not wholly as I imagined it would be. What I thought would be your writing-table is not a table but a bureau.

If we devote ourselves to finding holes exactly shaped to house such great words as Freedom, Honor, Bliss, I agree, we shall spend a lifetime slipping and sliding and searching, and all in vain.

We can bring [the island] to life only by setting it within a larger story.

I will leave behind my terraces and walls," he said. "They will be enough. They will be more than enough.”

It was I who shared Cruso's bed and closed Cruso's eyes.

Crushed under his soles whole clusters of the thorns that had pierced my skin.

Not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway by heart.

Day by day the wind picks at the roof and the weeds creep across the terraces.

My thoughts ran to Friday… Had I not been there to restrain him, would he in his hunger have eaten the babe? I told myself I did him wrong to think of him as a cannibal or worse, a devourer of the dead. But Cruso had planted the seed in my mind, and now I could not look on Friday’s lips without calling to mind what mean must once have passed them.

But those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate.

To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes…

The less they seem to me like fields waiting to be planted, the more like tombs.