Month: June 2015

In their final interview, Maria Gostrey wonders who or what made Lambert Strether the way he is. When she was at school in Geneva, she knew a boy who was fucked by a priest every Sunday morning. The sad set of his shoulders reminds her of Strether’s stoop. She imagines a world where it would be possible to un-fuck: not just to pull the cocks out of the cunts and the anuses and the mouths, not just to remove the tongues from the cocks and the anuses and the cunts, but to restore a person, by an act of love, to what he was like before he was ever fucked. To undo fucking with a gesture, with a word—with a silence. Like restoring antiques, it would be a kind of fraud, but as with antiques people might not mind the deception. If only we could believe that such a thing was possible! she thinks to herself, on the verge now of tears.

In their final interview, Maria Gostrey wonders who or what made Lambert Strether the way he is. When she was at school in Geneva, she knew a boy who was fucked by a priest every Sunday morning. The sad set of his shoulders reminds her of Strether’s stoop. She imagines a world where it would be possible to un-fuck: not just to pull the cocks out of the cunts and the anuses and the mouths, not just to remove the tongues from the cocks and the anuses and the cunts, but to restore a person, by an act of love, to what he was like before he was ever fucked. To undo fucking with a gesture, with a word—with a silence. Like restoring antiques, it would be a kind of fraud, but as with antiques people might not mind the deception. If only we could believe that such a thing was possible! she thinks to herself, on the verge now of tears.