Groan

[F]or all I know I didn't think anything at all, for all I know nothing passed before my eyes, no reflection, no memory, maybe my hands gripped the scarf out of a purely reflexive resistance to dying. They say we can never leave language behind; they say language is the essence of being human and that it conditions everything; they say you can't go outside it, for language has no exterior; they say we don't think first and then organize our thoughts into language later on, for language is what allows us to think; they say it is a condition, a necessary condition, of reason and human life—but if language is the essence of being human, then for those fifty seconds when he was killing me I don't know what I was.

It was curious to feel jealous of someone I had never met, married and living hundreds of miles from us; but mine is an abnormally jealous nature. I remember how, many years ago, I had a love affair with a Polish boy who had survived the concentration camps. In the camps he had been befriended by an older man, who had later become his lover; the older man had died in the gas-ovens, the boy had precariously survived. In the boy's room there had been a faded snapshot of the dead man, in a cheap passe-partout frame beside the bed, and often, after we had made our savage, sterile kind of love, I would find myself staring at that smudged face in a sudden access of loathing.