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            Let us recognize that "falling in love"-- I repeat that I am not talking about love sensu stricto -- is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.... A simple game of blowing hot and cold, of solicitousness and disdain, of presence and absence is all that is required.

                                                Jose Gasset y Ortega

            What is this need that Judy can't meet?  It seems that I need to relate to a woman who CAN'T relate, who hates me.  But why?  To demonstrate once and for all that I can't have what I want?  I choose an Iranian woman because I know that she is a slave and hates me because of 2000 years of slavery.  And I know that when she rejects me my pain and need won’t be able to contend with it.          

But she is so confused.  She never said once that she didn't love me.  She said that she didn't know what love is, and I, poor fool, went to the bookstore and bought some books on love that I seriously intended to give to her.   

            Ann was like that, but she turned out to be a lesbian.  I suspect Soheila of being a lesbian.  I see similarities between Ann and her.  No, I don't really "suspect."   Her culture wouldn't allow her to even admit it to herself.   

            I bought the books because I thought she really wanted me to tell her what love is.  Ann and I had discussions about love.  She turned out to be a disciple of Ayn Rand.  She had even changed her name to Ann!  Love for her was a "celebration of a victory," and I was nothing to celebrate about!  But she was tormented by lesbian fantasies and fears that she might be a lesbian.  Hardly anything to celebrate about.    

            Now that Soheila is obviously avoiding me, I feel betrayed.  After all, SHE was just as responsible for this as I was.  Because I made sure that she would be.  She walked across the grass just so that she would cross my path, and then, to make sure that she made a move towards me, I just looked at her and didn't say hello.  I let her think that I might not say hello.  Then when she was only a few feet from me, I looked at her again and then she made a move to say hello and we met each other half way.  I made it clear that I would walk past her if she didn't give me a strong indication that she wanted to talk.   

            I feel betrayed.  And then again, I am confused, because in a sense it feels like I decided not to see HER.  When we were standing outside the cafeteria, and she pulled her hand away from mine, I asked her if SHE wanted to see ME.  I was no longer passionately telling her that I HAD to see her.  I had accepted that it was impossible, and I felt relieved.   

            I love her, but it seems like an impossible love.  My love would kill her, I would fuck her into insensibility and in a few years I would see the impossibility of living with a purely sensual and passionate woman.   

            And now that I haven't seen her for over a week, I feel angry.  She is simply playing the game she has always played with me.  She will see me when SHE wants to.  Otherwise she will avoid me completely.    

            Why should I be forced to play her game?  I want to avoid HER.  Now my imagination tells me that she watches for me, and that she is an intriguer, and a petty coquette, that she purposely placed herself on my path that day, knowing what she was going to say.  It tells me that all during the fall and winter quarter, she avoided me, and refused to respond to me until SHE decided to find ME.    And she has told everybody about it.  I imagine each Iranian face to be different now.  They look at me as if I am a fool, a romantic idiot.  As if I've fallen in love with a whore.  As if I can't get an American woman so I have to dream about a slave woman, a woman who is nothing but an ugly little hypocrite who would do anything to get an Iranian husband, who probably HAS done anything to get an Iranian husband, but who will never get anything but another woman's husband or probably another woman.  Well this is obviously just gall.    

            I feel depressed now because all my problems seem to be financial.  It seems like I am only working for money.  As soon as my emotions are touched, computers become infinitely boring.   

            The Arab Jamal is a thirty six-year-old playboy who has been married to an American girl and has had innumerable love affairs.  He is rich.  He's going back to Syria to BUY a young wife.  I can hardly believe it.  The way he talks about it.  I couldn't resist telling him that Soheila said all Arabs are animals.  He looked really hurt and said, "she said that did she?  Well, you know what WE think about THEM.  We think they do things, that they are hypocrites."  I asked him how he knew.  And he said, "there are stories.  We hear about them."  All I could think about was that disgusting story that Donna told me about her sister’s rich Iranian "friend".  The essence or it is that her sister and the Iranian woman are "lovers", and that the Iranian woman can't "go with" any man except a black man since she had her affair with a famous black lawyer.  The really disgusting thing she said was, "THEY let themselves be beaten on.  BLACK women don't allow that.  NO man's gonna beat on me."   

            I hate myself for not loving Vida Behnaz properly.  Her eyes were so passionate that day in the snack bar that I literally couldn't stand to look at her.  I turned my back on her.   

            My job is the cause.  I'm forced to work too hard.  I don't have time.  These women want too much.  They want a man to forget everything for passion but only a rich man can do that.   

            Probably because I loved both of them, or thought I did, I told Soheila she looked so much like Vida Behnaz that they could be sisters.  Then, at our "meeting", when she told me that "everyone thinks we look alike," I felt like killing myself.  She tells everybody everything.  Vida must hate me for that. She SHOULD hate me.   

            It's absurd to go on like this.  My love is nothing.  I am nothing.  It might as well be hatred.  It has produced nothing but confusion, absurdity.  They are all laughing at me.  I should forget about her.   

            But how can you forget something like this?  We almost cried.  She became almost hysterical.  But all she felt was power - - power over me.  As soon as I said something she didn't like she said, "I'll let you go now!"  And then, I think my pain was more a sadness at the absurdity of life and my own passion, MY life.   

Napoleon GOT Josephine whom he loved so desperately, so passionately.  She who didn't love him, and could only say about him: "He is so drôle this Bonaparte."  I thank the Gods that I didn't get Soheila.   

            I feel like I'm not worthy of passion.  Vida Behnaz loved me, and I loved her, but I couldn't admit it.  And now it’s too late for us.  Do I love Soheila BECAUSE she doesn't love me?  Is THAT why Vida hates me now?   

            Soheila said, "when my wife's uncle lived in Iran she was always explaining to them."  I didn't even bother to correct her.  I am such a fool, they probably ARE lesbian lovers, she probably IS married to her uncle's wife.  She said her aunt finally stopped explaining.  Soheila too is tired of explaining.   

            What makes me infinitely sad is that I have willed this.  This is my love.  I still love this woman.   

            When I gave her the little green book of the Ayatollah’s sayings she said to me, almost sternly, "that is no way to learn about Iran," and I said something inane and ridiculous like, "I am not interested in your country or your language, I am only interested in you."  Then later, disappointed at the lack of response to my love, I almost said to her, "I hope they shoot you when you go back to Iran!"  But I didn't.  I just continued to love her.  For two and a half hours I tried to pry her loose from her rock.   

            But I'm consumed with hatred now.  For the whole pack of animals in the Middle East.  We should avoid them, they are infinitely beneath us.  They are sickly - sweet hypocrites.  They are weak and corrupt.  They pose no real danger to us, but we must look away from them and avoid them at all costs.   

            Ironically it will be American women who will suffer the most at the hands of these Middle Eastern dogs.  Because women are so much more susceptible to their feelings than men are.  I am only an exception.  Now I sound like some inverted American version of Moammar Kadafi!  I suppose my wounds will heal and I'll see this as so much stupid gall.  Enough.  

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             we can say that whoever falls in love does so because he wants to fall in love.  That distinguishes falling in love which is finally a normal phenomenon, from obsession, which is a pathological one.

                                                Jose Gasset y Ortega

            She reassured me that there is nothing between them!  She is a coquette!  She reassured me as if she wanted to say (which I know is true) "you are infinitely above him in my feelings."  Yet she sat next to him to make me jealous.  The next class meeting, when I was sitting on the other side of the room, her face was pale, she looked confused.  After two more meetings, she stopped coming to class.  Then I didn't see her until that day when she was with her aunt.  As if the aunt were protecting her.  But why?  I hadn't done anything.  I had said nothing.   

            Certainly we had one ravishing moment, one ravishing conversation.  A lovely conversation that I didn't record anywhere, but that lives in my heart.  She wore an outer garment of thin cotton, with long sleeves.  She always covered her arms, even in summer.  Then, after we had talked for awhile she took off the outer garment to reveal soft, plump upper arms that I had never seen before, although we had been in classes together for a year.  I felt as if I was the first American man who had ever seen her arms and I looked at them as I might look at an American girl’s breasts before making love for the first time.  We sat there in the shade, oblivious to the rest of the world, just looking into each other’s faces, and using our conversation as an excuse.  I looked at her arms and cheeks and hair as if she belonged to me, as if we were alone in the shade of some secret garden.  My senses were inflamed.  I left after an hour of this sweet-talking, intoxicated, trying not to think about her until the next class meeting, but overwhelmed by my love.  And it was at that next class meeting that she chose to sit next to him, to place him between us!   

            The pain was even greater because I thought that she had come to the class just to see me.  It was our plan to take the course together in the summer, but that class was cancelled.  That fall, her girlfriend came to class the first meeting, and saw me there.  She is a tall, conventional beauty who lives with an older American man.  Soheila came to the next meeting, and her friend never came again.   

            Judy was probably right about the aunt: Soheila confided in her, the aunt sensed strong passion, became indignant and overreacted.  Judy said that Soheila probably won't confide in her aunt again!   

            About a week or so after the incident with her aunt, I saw her with a young woman who looked like she could be her aunt’s daughter.  I assume she was the cousin that Soheila has talked about.  But this time, she gave me a longing look full of fire.  My slight wave, a barely perceptible movement of the hand, drew an instant response.  We were like two prisoners seeing each other after a long absence, feasting on each other.   

            And then after the Christmas break, she was in the cafeteria, sitting across from me at my table, lovely, insouciant, gently teasing me.  I was foolish enough to think that she wanted to mend these imaginary fences!  I thought for sure that I would see her again soon.  But when I didn't see her for 3 months I was bitterly disappointed and angry.  I reasoned that she had asked me to tell her the classes I was taking, and teaching, only to avoid me more easily.  So when I saw her again at the very beginning of Spring Quarter, I was passionately angry, and I demanded to see her.  I TOLD her three times that I wanted to see her.  And she responded by telling me three times that I COULD see her.  And then, again, my mood became ecstatic.  But two weeks passed, and then three, and still no Soheila.  Then, certainly, she planned an encounter.  She pretended to be walking nonchalantly in my customary path....    It is an enigma.  I am certain now that she loves me, but is terrified of me and her love.  She is in worse condition than I am because she loves America and State.  She has been in America for five years, and this campus is the only place in America that she knows.  As a popular teacher, I have a symbolic value for her, and for the entire Iranian community.   

            Why is she so full of lies and duplicity?   Why is she so "neurotic" and why does she obviously feel herself unworthy of me?  Is it because she thinks that she has simply allowed me to project my love onto a blank screen, and that she can't possibly live up to my expectations?   

            What about the spy?  Her friend.  The one who has been in the same Pascal class that I am sitting in on?  The one who didn't come today.  Soheila said she came to class to see her friend that day.  She peeked her head through the door a few minutes before class was out, so I knew she was standing there.  I walked past her, and walked to the hallway door, then turned around and waited for her to look at me.  She asked, "how are you?"  I just smiled and showed her my disappointment and hurt, and turned and walked out.  As if to say, "I told you I wanted to see you, and you said that I could, but it is the same old thing, I never see you."  But this last time, after she said she didn't want to see me again, I sensed that she was standing out there again.  Ali was standing opposite her, and I sensed he was there almost out of disbelief, or to protect her, or just to see what would happen.  But she didn't peek her head in this time, and I didn't know for certain that she was there.  I only knew that he was talking to someone, or at least looking at someone at the other side of the open door.  I was angry, emotional.  As soon as class was over, I just burst out of the room, trying not to appear too emotional, nodding hello to Ali, and this time not looking back before going through the outer door.  Really, just pretending that I didn't know that she was there.  But I sensed that she was. All during the class I was aware of her friend.  I wasn't really hostile, only searching.  Letting her know that I know that they are playing games.  She wouldn't meet my eyes, as if she were afraid of the evil eye, or just felt overwhelmingly guilty and stupid about everything that happened, but was powerless to convince Soheila that she should see me again, that I would be infinitely good for her.   

            So I won't see her again except at some odd time when SHE decides it is right, and I am unprepared for her and unable to respond.   

            The gods are athirst for human blood.  She will wake up in Teheran, one cold, clear night, she will look up at that eternal white blanket of stars, she will be my age, and she will be able to think of nothing but me.  She will cry silent, lonely, bitter tears, tears that will stream down her cheeks as mine have in the pain of not having her, in the pain of seeing that beautiful, graceful woman, so infinitely desirable, so deliciously lovely, sink back into the chaos and confusion of Islam.   

            Let my pain not turn to gall and hatred.  Let me love on in purity.  My soul has touched a noble soul and watched the awful spectacle of that soul being pulled back into that primitive, woman denying religion.  Let my hatred burn for that!  And let my love of Soheila continue in its infinite gentleness.    

            I wonder if?  I find myself wondering whether... I feel that I would do anything to make love to her.  Does that simply translate into self-sacrifice? That seems so ordinary, so mundane.  Or, is it something stupid and simple, a selfish, self-delusion: I marry her for a few years, she becomes an American citizen, she gets a good job, I fall out of love, get a divorce.  She is led forcibly into the kingdom of "love". But if that’s it, why didn't I just seduce her?  Why aren't I a more sophisticated Don Juan? (Instead of Werther?)   

            I am confused by a kind of idiocy that I can't seem to shake off.  I suppose like everything else, if you just look at it clearly the solution is obvious: I work too hard, I don't have the leisure and the money to enjoy myself in this vain world.  I have barred myself from the vanity of the world and I am not a skilled enough lover to get the true....  

Forty One 

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            This is the great weapon of the virtuous coquette.  Anything can be said by a glance, and yet one can always repudiate a glance because it cannot be quoted word for word.

                                                            Stendhal

            Seduction seems absurd in the light of all of this.  Neither does my passion come through.  I seem very controlled, ignoble.  Why?  Because my love was rejected!  As Napoleon said, victory justifies everything.  No matter how I interpret her actions, I feel at bottom, rejected, humiliated.  It is hard to be rhapsodic.  Well, I am too tired to pursue this. The storm encompassed Judy also, and I will have to write about that.   

            It has only been three weeks since our meeting, but it seems like....  The Pascal class meets only two more times.  I don't feel like going today.  It is possible that I will never even see her again!  I 'm certain that she loves me. Why is she doing this to herself and to me?  Why do women pretend to be so pure and then go to such extremes?  I wonder if intelligence has any place in the world at all.  The world just rolls on in injustice.  Pain and death are permanent reminders of the essential, final injustice of it all.  Was the Buddha right after all?  No!  Remember Napoleon in Russia.  So much pain and death. But Napoleon strives with the current of his destiny.  That is all the difference.   

            It doesn't even occur to me that she doesn't love me.  Yet that could be the key to everything.  But I can't believe that I could be that blind.  Am I too old, or unattractive to a Moslem woman in some way that is beyond my experience? Maybe they need to be taken in a way that is impossible for a Western man to even imagine.  Aren't they still the slaves of men in all areas of the Middle East?  Especially in Iran, now?    

            I didn't go to class.  It is my only possibility of seeing her.  Thursday is, then, the only possibility before summer.  And in the summer I will be buried in my Pascal class.  Whenever I teach something for the first time, I can't do anything else.   

            I don't want to lose her.  I feel possessive, as if she is a delectable young virgin.  Therefore I don't love her, my love is a useless passion, a selfish, useless passion.   

            Yes, if she were a lesbian, I would hate her.  Then I would see her as putting an ugly barrier between us, of using me to fan the flames of her lust to a wall of fire that she only intends for herself and the reflections of herself. Then I would hate her with a pure, black hatred.  But this animation, this blood coursing through my veins, this cankered resurgence of energy is ugliness, is base.  I refuse to be moved by my hatred.  It is just bad luck to love and not be loved in return.    

            I am sitting in the library, looking through the large glass windows at the place where she might appear.  It feels like my only chance.  For what?  Love? Can a whole life hang in the balance of a chance meeting?  Of course not!  Least of all for me.  My life has always been a flowing, it never moves in jumps or discontinuities.  When it jumps, there is always a hidden logic or necessity. Even the most disjointed loves in my life have appeared necessary in retrospect.   

            But passion itself has this feeling of destiny, of uniqueness, of terrible single-minded necessity.  Intelligence laughs at all passion.  I feel stupid, absurd.  Yet the heightened feelings, the ecstasy of anticipation that she provides me with.  A single glance.   

            The Iranians all look at me with encouraging eyes now.  Soheila’s tall friend, the pretty one with the American husband (boyfriend (?)), smiled coquettishly in the cafeteria.  I let her bump into me.  We had a nice, intimate exchange and she said with her eyes: yes, go after her, stop at nothing, you have our permission, we all approve.  Hossein was with me.  He too has told me to continue.   

Sometimes I see Soheila as an unformed, self-centered, culture-bound woman. Have I made my love all-important, and not the object of my love?  Was I so sure of myself, so sure that I would inspire love, that I simply failed to see that she couldn't love me?  That she is too inexperienced to see what I am, to even know what is best for her?   

            It is the love that is important, that gives so much pleasure.  That is the all-important paradox.  It is the need to love that is so imperious, not the need to be loved.  It is the need to love that brings man to the edge of folly, and beyond, into despair.   

I just saw her, from the window.  She looked so Iranian, talking to her sister.  Her face had a self-contained, almost placid look, virginal, sad.  She was heading towards the computer center.

I went down there, in a state of agitation, to talk to her, but I turned back. It is too much.  It is a selfish passion that she can't possibly respond to.  There is no hope.  She is too young, too virginal.  I have to protect her form my passion.

But I am angry with her.  She is hypocritical and narcissistic, something I've known all along.  Why did I rush down there like that?  Can I forget her? Can I learn something essential about myself?

Soheila is just another woman like my mother.  I will never have her, and if I do get her she will then transform herself into something else.  She will no longer be desirable.  Seeing her through the window, I realized that she wasn't even pretty.  She is only illusive.

Yet I am certain that SHE loves me, and is afraid of me and of her love for me.

I will make no effort to see her.  I have made all the effort any man can be expected to make and she has rejected me.  So until SHE decides, I will make every effort to forget her.

                                    Abel Bonnard

            The insight is that I am pursuing my mother one last time, and that I must stop, finally, forever.  That includes one logical move, which is to allow myself to be disinherited financially, finally, once and for all.  Even then, it isn't really probable that I will be disinherited, but certainly it seems possible.  It must be done though.  This could be the lesson of Soheila.  Stop running after the whores of the world: the whore of Islam, the hypocritical lesbian from that man-dominated fanatical world that I have learned to hate so much without ever having gone there.   

Yesterday I saw a beautiful young blond woman, not more than 25 years old, with a mulatto baby, sitting in an old, beat up car with an ugly, overweight black man of about 40.  She seemed desperately unhappy, just as I was, - - just as I am.  She wouldn't meet my eyes.  I sat there with my window open, listening to a beautiful, sad aria from Zaide.  He looked brutal, angry; she looked infinitely sad, desperate.  She wouldn't look into my eyes, eyes that were so burdened with the pain of lost love.  I felt suicidal.  I know that I shouldn't own a gun, if only because of moments like those.   

            That is the fate of women like Soheila.  Women who can't love men, who hate themselves, who consign themselves to misery, lesbianism, loneliness.  I can't chase them.  It can't be my destiny to love the unattainable.  Yet it raised such passion in me.  It WAS a catalyst!  It HAD a purpose!  How painful it is to see the self-immolation and self-destruction of a beautiful young woman sacrificing herself to the lust of an ugly, brutal, fat, lecherous middle aged man.   

            I will continue.  I refuse to hate her.  But I love the possible.  May my motto be: love under the aegis of understanding.  Love and knowledge.  Never again will love of the unattainable be my fate.   

            Soheila, life, mother.  Sitting in that child care center, watching the sun go down, the last child to be picked up, waiting.  Longing for my mother.  Never again.  Thank the Gods, thank the dying Gods, for their last gifts.  No more longing for ANYTHING that is impossible.  Amor fati.    

            Today, for the last time, I saw her.  She was wearing her bright red blouse, the one that she rarely wears.  She saw me, and looked away in anger!  My love draws anger from her passionate, fearful soul!  It isn't as if she were in black, wearing some quasi-veil!  No, she is dressed in red; she is the siren of State!  With the audacity to ignore me and be angry with me for declaring love and praising her in the best way that I knew how.   

            And I was so noble in my accession to her wish not to see me.  Why this parting shot of hostility?  It is the sign of a barbaric civilization.  The sign of a mind turning its back on civilization.  It is MY lesson.  I repeat it.  I will never allow it again.  I have been taught something about MY NEED to love a woman who is incapable of love.  THAT is the lesson of this.    

            But it is my wounded pride speaking, and then my self-pity.  She gave me a wildly passionate look of anger.  It hurt very much.  I felt like calling out her name, but a combination of pride and a feeling that she MUST come to me restrained me.   

            I don't know why it is possible for me to feel love, or passion, for a woman that I would have difficulty living with, a woman that would cause me pain.   

            It is as if some deep register of feeling has been sounded in me, and that is all.  Maybe it shouldn't be called love at all, maybe it is simply lust - - lust 10.  And lust 1 is against her religion, not to speak of lust 2 or 3.  They shoot them in Iran for lust anything.  Therefore she (in flaming red blouse) HAD to give me a passionately angry look.  She rushed down the steps, twenty feet from me sitting there.  I gave a hopeless half wave.  She turned at the bottom of the stairs and walked away from me as fast as she could, ran up another flight of stairs and then rushed past the book store and disappeared behind a big tree, never looking back or to the side.  I watched her for twenty or thirty seconds.  I sat with a pain in my solar plexus and a lump in my throat.   

            The entire campus was deserted except for a man of about 30 who was sitting on the grass behind me.  What can I say?  That’s the end of it.  Does she want me to chase her?  Maybe.  Absence diminishes mediocre passions and augments great ones, according to La Rochefoucauld.  But what does he know about anything?  I suppose I fear in addition that I will be overburdened with everything this summer including plans for Europe, and that she is leaving for Iran in September.  I don't think she will go, but I will go to Europe, and she will graduate, and there will be a three-week break, so it feels final, over, no matter how much passion there is.  Vanity, passion, whatever, it is over.   But it doesn't FEEL over.  

            It began validly, progressed to the stage of absurdity and then transformed itself into an obsession.  It was the result of taking a great chance, and failing.