Not a shred of direct archaeological evidence has been found for Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, or the 400 years the children of Israel sojourned in Egypt. The same is true for their miraculous exodus from slavery.

The timeless and recurrent theme of L’Année dernière à Marienbad (“Last Year in Marienbad”), a 1961 French movie directed by Alain Resnais, starring Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff, script by Alain Robbe-Grillet. A textual simulation of Last Year in Marienbad. Use the text generated instead of Lorum Ipsum in your test pages, but people might actually read it!

When did it begin? Yes, it must have been last year in Marienbad. The hotel was just like this one. You just smile weakly. Sometimes, you seem to be anxious and distracted. But, of course, you do remember. You must remember. One cold evening, I went up to your bedroom. It was a plush bedroom of finely embroidered damask wall coverings, Moorish looking sofas and Persian rugs. It seems as if you were waiting, silently, seductively, lying across the sateen sofa a faint smile about your red lips. The details seem indistinct to me, now, but you accepted that you did remember, eventually. I was a hotel devoid of memory, but I am beginning to remember. They were all dressed in formal attire, and engaged in polite murmured conversations while standing about decorously, in the unobtrusive manner of well bred people.

I never heard anyone raise a voice in this hotel. No one. The conversations developed in a void, as if the sentences meant nothing, were intended to mean nothing, in any case. And a sentence, once begun, suddenly remained in suspension, as though frozen by the frost, starting over afterwards, no doubt, at the same point, or somewhere else. It did not matter. The same conversations always recurred, the same absent, low, monotonous voices. Everywhere there were signs, Silence! Quiet! The servants were mute. The games were played in silence. And when you joined in their conversations, you spoke with an exuberance that seemed unnatural there. Here, exuberance, especially in a woman, seems subversive. The architecture of the hotel and its grounds seems lifeless, geometrical, synthetic. The park is a vast Versailles garden reassuringly arranged, with clipped bushes, and regular paths where we may walk with measured steps, side by side, day after day, within arm’s reach but without ever coming any closer to each other. A vast window opening on to the terrace from the grand entrance and staircase affords us a view of the main avenue with its tiny figures moving from station to station as if choreographed. They seem like simulacra and not real people. The guests drifted like somnabulists from the court where the stage was, and mingled with the histrionic statues that lined the room. I imagine them as if they were captured on a still photograph, people, statues, palmate trees, silent, still. They stand statuesque, motionless with a vacant gaze among the emptily chatting guests and the theatrical decorations. Which are the people and which the statues?

I have a recurring memory of moving slowly through the hallways, galleries, and salons of the hotel’s endless passages. I am walking on, again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this sun-king splendour of a long dead age, this enormous, florid, fustian, flamboyant hotel, where galleries succeed endless galleries, silent, dead galleries overloaded with a dim, cold floridness of woodwork, plasterwork, tracery, marble, smoked glasswork, blackened oil paintings, columns, heavy hangings, sculptured door frames, series of door arches, corridors, intersecting galleries that open in turn on rooms overloaded with out-dated decoration, silent chambers, empty hallways. Eurydice forever falls back into the underworld. She did not just fall once. Orpheus did not look back only once in all eternity. He does it continuously. Perpetually. There is a way. The rules are clear and prescribed before hand. If the world is orderly, there is a way. There is a strategy. I cannot seem to determine it. And between games, sometimes I speak to you.

Remember? After speaking to you in your bedroom, he left to join the others at the shooting gallery. I came to see you while he was busy, but he returned holding a Luger. He seemed to be in a jealous rage. He fired several shots. You fell across the sateen sofa (or was it silk?), lying inadvertantly in a seductive posture, lying provocatively. I felt my heart explode. In a sepulchral pose… you looked as diaphanous as your dress. Through the mist of time, it seems clear to me, though so long ago. I can imagine it. You must remember it. It seemed he had killed you. Wait! … Can it be right? No!… It … cannot be right. Time swirls, plays tricks. So hard to remember. Memory is unreliable. I need you alive, as you were then. It was not like that. No, that is not the way of it. You are alive, must be alive. It is a mistake. I must clear my head. Work it out better. You are not dead. You understand. You will know. I shall explain to you. You will know then. You will remember… This year you promised to elope with me, to leave him. Slowly I convinced you. The past is a stifling, lifeless place. It all seemed to me strange, even indeterminate. Did things happen quite like that? It sometimes seemed not to make sense. It seemed ambiguous and uncertain. Let’s get one thing straight, memory is like myth, and myth is the basis of ritual. We ritualize things, and must then do them continually. Myth is like thoughts, it stands for what is continuous. Good and evil are always in conflict. Michael did not fight the dragon, he is always fighting it. Unceasingly. Myth tells us why, but represents actions that never cease. Dare we let them cease? If they were to cease, would life then cease too? Perhaps our habits are necessary. The wolf habitually howls to its god, the moon. Must he do it? But let us get one thing straight, here, questions have no meaning?

Last uploaded: 14 October, 2009.