Desire and desirelessness

Desire and desirelessness form a recurring tension in the conversations between Roland Michell and Maud Bailey. As they try to imagine the intense convictions of Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, their own present appears marked by scrutiny, suspicion of romantic love, and exhaustion. The idea of desiring nothing is not merely a private wish: the same image of an empty white bed occurs independently to both researchers, making desirelessness a surprising basis for mutual recognition.

Historical Imagination and Present-Day Desire

While discussing Ash’s poems, Roland and Maud consider what it might have felt like for Ash and LaMotte to believe in love, in themselves, and in the significance of what they did. Maud contrasts their predecessors’ apparent intensity with a contemporary outlook that sees sex everywhere and understands the self as composed of conflicting systems. They know desire drives people, she says, but wonder whether that knowledge makes it harder to experience desire as Ash and LaMotte might have done.

The contrast is not simply between past passion and present restraint. Maud observes that contemporary readers also approach desire by examining it closely, and suspects that such scrutiny can itself alter what is desired. In that reflection, the researchers’ historical investigation becomes a mirror: their attempt to recover an earlier emotional world exposes the distance between its assumptions and their own, without allowing them to treat either period’s experience as fully transparent.

Mystery and the Limits of Analysis

Maud invokes LaMotte’s line, “Outside our small safe place flies Mystery,” to name what she feels their own age has set aside. The line links desire to a larger uncertainty that cannot be settled by observation alone. Looking closely may yield knowledge, but it may also diminish the openness in which desire and mystery operate.

Roland responds that he sometimes thinks the best state would be to have no desire. As he begins to examine his own life, Maud interrupts with the question of whether there is a self to inspect at all. Their exchange places the wish for desirelessness beside their doubts about a stable, unified identity. Rather than resolving either doubt, the conversation lets the two ideas reinforce each other: if the self is not unitary, then the desire to make it quiet or empty may be less a settled philosophical position than a response to the difficulty of living with its competing demands.

The Empty White Bed

Roland describes what he wants as “to have nothing,” imagining an empty, clean bed in a clean, empty room where nothing is asked or expected. He connects part of this longing to his personal circumstances but also considers it more general. The image gives desirelessness a concrete form: not an achievement or a new object of longing, but a space free of demands.

Maud recognizes the image before Roland can present it as uniquely his. She says she has thought, when alone, about how good it would be to have nothing and to desire nothing; she sees the same empty bed in an empty room, white. Their brief exchange of the word “White” and their realization that the image is exactly the same make the coincidence an intimate discovery. It does not prove that their experiences are identical, but it reveals an unexpected correspondence between them, one they had not reached through their work on Ash and LaMotte.

They wonder whether they are symptomatic of whole groups of exhausted scholars and theorists, or whether the coincidence belongs only to them. The question keeps both interpretations open: desirelessness may register a wider weariness with analysis and intellectual self-consciousness, yet it also has a particular force because these two people have independently arrived at the same image. Their laughter at having come together for research and discovered this about each other marks a change in the encounter from shared intellectual labor to personal recognition.

Recurrence and the Wish to Withdraw

The idea returns when Maud later recalls what they said to each other about empty beds at the Foss. Roland remembers not only the beds but also the white light on stone and the sun at Boggle Hole. Maud says that there they knew where they were and that they should disappear, like Christabel. The recalled image has thus moved beyond an abstract wish for relief: it is bound to a particular shared moment and to the possibility of stepping away from the researchers’ entanglement in other people’s stories.

Roland’s phrase “Celibacy as the new volupté. The new indulgence” gives their restraint a deliberate paradox. Desirelessness can be imagined as a release from pressure, yet naming it as an indulgence makes clear that renunciation, too, can carry attraction. Across these conversations, the empty bed is neither a simple rejection of intimacy nor proof that desire has vanished. It is a recurring figure for wanting freedom from demands, while its shared meaning draws Roland and Maud closer and shapes their emerging wish to disappear together from the stories they have been pursuing.