No Longer Human ( PDFDrive )

80
She rambled on, but I have never been able to get
interested when women talk about themselves. It may
be because women are so inept at telling a story
(that is, because they place the emphasis in the wrong
places), or for some other reason. In any case, I have
always turned them a deaf ear.
"I feel so unhappy."
I am sure that this one phrase whispered to me
would arouse my sympathy more than the longest,
most painstaking account of a woman's life. It amazes
and astonishes me that I have never once heard a
woman make this simple statement. This woman did
not say, "I feel so unhappy" in so many words, but
something like a silent current of misery an inch
wide flowed over the surface of her body. When I
lay next to her my body was enveloped in her current,
which mingled with my own harsher current of
gloom like a "withered leaf settling to rest on the
stones at the bottom of a pool." I had freed myself
from fear and uneasiness.
I It was entirely different from the feeling of being
* able to sleep soundly which I had experienced in the
j arms of those idiot-prostitutes (for one thing, the
prostitutes were cheerful); the night I spent with
that criminal's wife was for me a night of liberation
and happiness. (The use of so bold a word, affirmatively,
without hesitation, will not, I imagine, recur
in these notebooks.)