Susan

All the poison. All the lies. That’s what the world is made of: poison and lies. I don’t believe in anything anymore. What I’m doing seems so futile. But I just want to curl up with Susan Taubes and close myself to everything else.

And when I’m writing about her, I’m writing about poison and lies. Or learning to how to write about them. I need help and she helps me. I think …

Because she has the same sense of world-dread and world-horror. Of poison and lies. Just the fact that she existed. Just because I can think of her, so brilliant, so beautiful, writing these things. This young Jewish woman. This Hungarian. From Old Europe. From Old destroyed Europe. Married to this maniac, Jacob Taubes. This madman part of some weird gnostic cult …

I think Cicero wants to start a weird gnostic cult.

 

I just like being with her, Susan Taubes. With her essays. And her letters – oh her letters. When she was very young and brilliant and ardent and in love with her husband and hanging out with Camus and Arendt back in 1950, 51, 52 … I just like being close to Europe and all these intellectuals with so many urgent things to think about.

 

Who am I to write about Susan Taubes? I’m not some international scholar. I’m travelling to Hungary or wherever to look through her archive. But I have to write about Susan Taubes. It’s fate.