Free Things and A Man Asleep by Georges Perec Page B

happiness.
    Where were the dangers? Where were the threats? In the past men fought in their millions, and millions still do fight, for their crust of bread. Jérôme and Sylvie did not quite believe you could go into battle for a chesterfield settee. But that was all the same the banner under which they would have enlisted most readily. There was nothing, they thought, that concerned them in party manifestos or in government plans: they would sneer at early retirement pension schemes, increased holiday entitlements, free lunches, the thirty-hour week. They wanted superabundance - Garrard turntables, empty beaches for their eyes only, round-the-world trips, grand hotels.
    The enemy was unseen. Or, rather, the enemy was within them, it had rotted them, infected them, eaten them away. They were the hollow men, the turkey round the stuffing. Tame pets, faithfully reflecting a world which taunted them. They were up to their necks in a cream cake from which they would only ever be able to nibble crumbs.
    For years the crises they had encountered had scarcely dented their good humour. They hadn't taken them as inevitable or terminal affairs; they were crises in which nothing was at stake. They often reflected that friendship was protecting them. The group held together, reliably, cohesively, it was a firm guarantee of their stability, a force they could count on. They were sure they were right because they knew they would stick together, and they liked nothing more than to be together at one or another's flat towards the end of an especially awkward month, sitting around a tureen of potatoes and bacon, sharing their last cigarettes as fraternally as it was possible to do.
    But friendships, too, began to fray. Some evenings, within the finite fields of their unspacious rooms, the couples that had come together crossed swords by word and eye. Some evenings, they finally grasped that their fine friendships, their almost hermetic language, their private jokes, this shared world, shared language, the common gestures they had made up, were based on nothing: theirs was a shrunken universe, a world running out of steam, opening onto nothing. Their lives were not conquests, but slow collapses, dispersions. That was when they realised how deeply they were condemned to habit, to sluggishness. They were bored in each other's company as if all there had ever been between them was a void. Puns, boozing, walks in the woods, dinner parties, endless discussions about films, plans, gossip had long stood in for adventure, history and truth. But the words were hollow, the gestures empty, without substance, without consequence, without a future, words repeated a thousand times, hands shaken a thousand times, ritual actions which no longer afforded them any protection.
    At that time they would spend an hour trying to agree about which film they would go to see. They would talk just for the sake of talking, play at riddles or at guessing games. Each couple, when alone, would speak harshly of the others and sometimes of themselves; they would harp on their lost youth; they would recall having once been enthusiastic, spontaneous, brim-full of real plans, of images of wealth, of desires. They would dream of new friendships; but they could barely manage to picture them.
    Slowly but with inexorable obviousness, the group fell apart. With sometimes brutal suddenness, in the space of barely a few weeks, it became obvious to some of them that the life of old would never again be on. Their weariness was too great. The outside world too demanding. People who had lived in rooms with no running water, who had dined on a quarter of a stick-loaf, who had believed they were living as they pleased, who had burnt the candle at both ends without running out of wick, such people, one fine day, settled down. They were swayed, almost naturally, almost objectively, by the temptation of a steady job, a staff appointment, bonus payments, and an extra salary cheque at