When I Was Old Page 4

  One might say that the collective is quickly forgotten to allow only the individual to survive. Which explains why history is necessarily false.

  My son Pierre, at thirteen months, amazes me by his capacity for wonder. This would seem to confirm my theory of little joys which is no doubt infantile, though I have continued to maintain it since I discovered it at twelve or thirteen. A hundred times a day he points to a picture, a flower, a piece of furniture, the design in a carpet, a bedspread, and, as if in ecstasy, gives an ‘Oh … !’ of delight. Everything is beautiful. Everything is a source of pleasure.

  It was the first feeling he expressed, months ago. Will it last? I hope so. Johnny, at ten and a half, still has the same enthusiasm, with the difference that if there is a shadow in a picture, a little fault in an object, a delay in expected joy, he suddenly falls into despair.

  Pierre doesn’t see the shadows yet.

  I myself adjust to them.

  Same day, afternoon

  Certain works can be written only by the young. I wonder if this is because they demand more energy – creative energy. In the long run, I think it is because they are affirmative works. Later, one no longer affirms. One asks questions. But are one’s works less good? They are different.

  If I think this way, is it because I am reaching the age when others have stopped writing novels? Are we inclined to believe – in perfectly good faith – what reassures us?

  This brings me back to people’s good or bad faith. I don’t willingly believe in intrinsic bad faith. This would demand, like true evil, true vulgarity, more strength of character than I see in man. Man needs a certain amount of self-respect. You might say that he comes to terms with what is called his conscience.

  Later, if someone should read these lines, it is possible that he will be amazed that at this moment I have preoccupations which do not appear to be proportionate to reality.

  The Belgian Congo – Cuba – Algeria. A heightened awareness almost everywhere, in students (this delights me), threats of war … if the event were to take place tomorrow, which is not impossible, one would be tempted to say:

  ‘At the edge of cataclysm, a man asked questions about …’

  About very small things of a more or less personal order, I confess.

  I’m not the only one. It has always been that way.

  History happens every day and the importance of events only becomes evident after the fact.

  One doesn’t live with History, or rather one doesn’t live History. One lives his little personal life, or that of a group, or of an instant of humanity, of an instant in the life of the world.

  Besides, all these little questions which plague me have a relation to what one calls the great questions of reality.

  In rereading the history of the scientific discoveries of the last three or four centuries, especially all those in the field of medicine and biology, I have been amazed to observe that they almost all grew out of the patient observations of naturalists, scholars depicted in popular illustrations as being with wild hair and armed with magnifying glasses, dedicating their lives to a single species, almost always a very lowly one, a fly, a mould, an oyster, a frog …

  These scholars are the only ones whom I envy. True, just like other men, they only rarely arrive at certainties. The further they advance, the more their questions lead only to other questions. However, they do succeed in contributing one solid little stone, one pebble of truth from which others will build edifices of hypothesis. I think of the researchers at the University of Leiden, of the correspondence they exchanged for two or three centuries, from country to country (often in wartime), a few resolute men bent on enlarging their knowledge of the nature of our species. In spite of battles and blockades, the Royal Academy of London corresponded with scholars in Paris and neither one nor the other were considered traitors.

  Like the great naturalists, I would like to focus on certain human mechanisms. Not on grand passions. Not on questions of ethics or morality.

  Only to study the minor machinery which may appear secondary. That is what I try to do in my books. For this reason I choose characters who are ordinary rather than exceptional men. The too-intelligent man, the too-sophisticated, has a tendency to watch himself living, to analyse himself, and, by that very process, his behaviour is falsified.

  I devote myself, in short, to the least common denominator.

  If I were capable of understanding snails or earthworms, I would be happy to write a novel about snails or worms, and I would no doubt learn more about life and about man this way than in drawing my characters from contemporary man.

  In interviews, I often speak of the naked man in contrast to the clothed man.

  What a dream to go back, if it were possible, like the biologist, to the unicellular organisms!

  Pierre woke up and we went to do errands in town. With the three children. Three and not four because Marc is married. Next there will be two left with us, then one, then … It’s true that Pierre is only a little over a year old. My mother will be eighty next week. I don’t know her well, and she knows me still less.

  Isn’t this inevitable since I left her when I was nineteen? We lived nineteen years together, during which I was first a baby, then a little boy barely aware of the world, then a student more interested in his teachers and comrades than in his family, and finally, at fourteen, fifteen years old, a secretive boy.

  Isn’t it always this way? Marc too left at twenty. Do I know him any better than my mother knows me, although for those twenty years I observed him as passionately as I observe his brothers and his sister?

  Of our children too, all we know is a moment, a fraction of their development. They, for their part, only know of us the person we are at a given period.

  On that we judge each other.

  How not to be mistaken? Marc’s friends in Paris know a man whom I can only guess at, and his wife too knows him better than my wife and I, who raised him.

  The naturalist is luckier: he can study within a species a certain number, a great number, even generations.

  As for us, we only know the second half of the generation that precedes us and the first half of the one that follows us.

  As for our own generation, is it possible for us to see it with a clear eye? One has only to look at old classmates or fellow members of a regiment who meet and warm to each other when their only shared point is having been born in the same year in the same town, or of having passed eighteen months in the same camp.

  A man who had seen four or five generations born and dead, for example, would be interesting to listen to. On condition, of course, of being able to understand him. Wouldn’t he risk having himself locked up?

  P.S. Perhaps it will be objected that we have the lessons of history at our disposal. But history has only been lived and written by men who can draw on a maximum of eighty or ninety years. Same for philosophers. No, in the understanding of man (the opposite of the so-called sciences) the experiences of one and another cannot be placed end to end. They are superimposed. Perhaps each erases the preceding one. To put it another way, men cannot be added up. They replace each other. So that isolation appears to be a miracle – or an accident, in the least agreeable sense of the word.

  Enough, poor Jo! It’s time to go take a walk with the children, who still think you have answers for all their questions.

  21 July, morning

  Sun in my study. Going to go into town with Johnny and Marie-Jo. I’ve always loved the city in the morning, especially on a nice morning, when the shops are tidying up. It’s a little like a stage being set. I remember pubs in Liège, on the Rue de la Cathédrale, for example. Sun on the sidewalk. Inside, a bluish shadow, and the waiter, not yet dressed for the day, sweeping up the sawdust or spreading it afresh. Smell of beer. Barrels of beer rolled on the sidewalk, and enormous brewery horses which wait, sometimes striking the pavement with their hooves. Their conspicuously enormous stallion’s member hanging almost to the ground.

&n
bsp; I’m beginning to understand why so many writers have kept a notebook, a journal. You write freely, without thinking of the reader. It’s chatting with yourself.

  You can allow yourself to be ridiculous. Yesterday, for example, I was thinking of Rembrandt. I was reviewing in my mind some of his pictures. And it wasn’t accident that these images came to me. I had just been recalling those men who, in a very few centuries, had created biology, given new dimensions to the world. The father of Cartesianism foreshadowing Darwin and Freud. Perhaps Einstein too.

  Suddenly it seemed to me that these discoveries existed seminally in the pictorial world of Rembrandt. His chiaroscuro is already a critique of pure reason. Man no longer has definite outlines. For the first time the figure is not the essential element. It is part of a whole. Space has more value than man.

  Are painters precursors? I have only to take a few steps, to open a few works to find, on pages which I know, references that would give some weight to this embryo idea. Parallel, with dates to support it, between certain works of art and certain discoveries.

  I’m almost sure that it is the works of art that came first. Corot, van Gogh, Gauguin, then the Impressionists … The Impressionists most of all, who placed man in a new context. The real (I mean what up to then passed for real) is closely mixed with what yesterday was still unreal.

  Didn’t Dostoevsky precede Freud? Freud himself said he had read him and one may wonder if, without the Russian writer, he would have created his new image of man.

  If that’s the way it is, I’m behind the times. Abstract art would itself be a sort of precursor and it is a fact that it confirms scientific theories that are coming to light. Now, outside of a few exceptions (why?) abstract painting irritates me or leaves me cold. So I shall only be able, like so many others, to go a little way down that road. And, if it’s the rule, a man living in two hundred years, according to my hypothesis of yesterday, would teach us nothing since he would stop after having accompanied human evolution on his own bit of the way.

  I say evolution. I never dare pronounce the word ‘progress’, for the same reason that I mistrust the word ‘happiness’ and its opposite. It seems to me that in the end everything is compensatory.

  Is a middle-class American who earns four hundred dollars a month happier than the peasant of the Middle Ages? With the monthly bills to meet, the necessity of buying what advertising imposes on him, is he any less a slave?

  Another embryo idea too, which is funny, or rather which places me among the laymen, the dilettantes who adventure into forbidden territory. Four or five years at the university, a few books – which are, after all, within anyone’s reach – a few courses which are only lectures, without contact, most often, between the professor and the student, several hasty visits, for future doctors, to hospital rooms, are enough to establish a barrier that none can breach without being ridiculed.

  Too bad! I won’t pay attention to it, at least in these notebooks. And what does it matter if someone says later that I was riding my hobbyhorse? Is it any better to play cards or with an iron-ended stick and a hard little white ball, as in golf?

  Bacteriology, and especially virology, fascinate me. Even here, to be taken seriously (?), I would have to look at one of the books I’ve made notes in, cite names, references. I don’t want to clutter up my mind or my memory with what I know is at my disposal in my library.

  Well then, I have the impression that there is a tendency (oh, barely perceptible!) towards the simplification of diseases, or, more exactly, that some researchers are more or less consciously moving towards a unity of disease.

  The Greeks (it was not Hippocrates but, if I’m not mistaken, his successors) have already said that there are no diseases but only sick men.

  Then a number of diseases, more and more serious, were discovered and classified. After the bacteria and Rickettsia, the virus was arrived at. Eight-hundred-and-fifty-some at the last census. Now, seen through the electronic microscope, they are all the same and one cannot distinguish one from another.

  Forty-eight viruses just for influenza.

  And all evolve. New forms develop from cultures.

  By dividing, does one not move towards simplification, to arrive, perhaps, one day at that unity which some foresaw and sought?

  Hasn’t this unity almost been attained in physics?

  To arrive finally at one disease, Le Mal, Evil, or the destructive principle, but as many forms of this illness as there are invalids.

  For a number of years we knew only of four types of blood – O, A, B, and AB. Then the Rhesus factor was discovered. By now, seventeen or eighteen new subdivisions have been found, and a haematologist told me recently that it is not impossible that each person has a different type of blood.

  At the same time, about forty per cent of specialists tend to consider virus as a chemical composition rather than as living matter.

  From there to thinking that the reactions of different types of blood in the presence of an element which is unique in principle but which is transformed by each new contact, that these reactions, say I, constitute the multiform disease, rather than diseases …

  There is nothing scientific about this, obviously. But weren’t the theories of a Paracelsus often even more literary?

  It would be curious, intriguing. The mystic foresees science as Confucius foresaw the composition of the atom.

  Man first envisages unity.

  Then, forcing himself to divide, to partition, to multiply the elements …

  And, by dint of dividing thus, returns to unity.

  It is unimportant whether this is true or not. It delights me. And it gives me an impression of complicity with the world that surrounds me. I should say of solidarity, but I prefer complicity.

  It bothers me to belong to a human group, a nation, a race, a society. I feel more at ease in thinking that I am part of a vaster whole in which I am side by side with amoebas, on a level if not of equality, at least of … I can’t find the word and I won’t stop for it.

  A difference in time. The happenstance of arriving at this or that point on the curve. I am a man but I could have been an amoeba. Difference of degree, then, in evolution.

  It will be said that I haven’t sufficiently digested reading I wasn’t prepared for. It’s very possible. So much the worse and so much the better. I say so much the better because I find it to my profit.

  Noon. I’m back from a short walk in town – and purchases, of course! – with the children. Each time I open this notebook it’s with the intention of writing a sentence or two. Then I stretch it out.

  Medicine and social work, during these past years, have more or less suppressed natural selection. A new law has been added to the famous Rights of Man: the Right to Life. The right of the embryo to become a complete so-called being, at any cost. And already one glimpses the Right to Health. Free medicine, free care foreshadow it, as free studies foreshadow the Right to Knowledge.

  By dint of claiming or receiving rights, won’t man come to lose them all? What will be left of him, what will the human being be after several generations of no selection?

  And, as for the Right to Health, what will happen on the day, which seems near at hand, when worn-out organs, deficient glands, will be replaced by other human organs?

  Yesterday, at a medical convention that was held in London, an expert from the United States (I don’t like the word ‘expert’ which the newspapers and consequently the public today apply to anyone with a diploma who enunciates any hypothesis whatsoever), an American expert, that is, could say, without rousing any protest that by about 1980 or 1990 medicine will be able to practise prenatal selection of the individual, in the embryonic state, that it will be possible to produce human beings of superior intelligence (by what criterion?) and human beings who, totally fearless, will make ideal soldiers, all muscle, and others …

  So many centuries of effort to arrive at the ant!

  Is this science’s answer, its solution, to the probl
em of natural selection? The word ‘natural’ no longer applies since it is a matter of a human, in some sense abstract, solution.

  This frightens me as much as planned teaching, the schoolboy’s report book which, beginning with his twelfth year, accompanies the future man, comments from teachers and physicians who, at various stages, decide first the fate of the child, then that of the young man, then that of the adult. Custom-made competencies to fit the needs of the community, taking natural aptitudes into account.

  This revolution – for it is one, and very much more important, I think, than the French or the Russian Revolution – is being accomplished under our eyes without arousing a single protest.

  Social security is no less a revolution since it assumes that man is neither free nor responsible for his own future. The community takes him in charge. And, taking him in charge, takes on, in all logic, rights over him. Yesterday, in the French Chamber, for the first time the principle of the suppression of home distilleries was discussed.

  This means in general that drunkenness in the provinces is costing the State too much. It also means that the apples from his apple trees no longer completely belong to the farmer since he may not turn them into alcohol for his personal use.

  Aspirin also is dangerous for some people. And so are fried potatoes. These are far-reaching things. I wonder if those who decide these measures realize what they imply.

  (I am always the first to deplore drunkenness, but isn’t it an illness, both individual and social, which has only the vaguest relationship with apples, plums, and the wastes that these home distillers transform? What frightens me – or makes me laugh – or enrages me, I’m not quite sure – is the erosion of certain basic principles that were in use for so long and their replacement by principles that are not yet written, nor formulated, but which spring no less from measures which, at first glance, appear to be only measures of a practical order.)