When I Was Old Read online

  Once written down that way, it looks idiotic. Nevertheless my idea, confused enough, it’s true, is that in the last analysis each one believes in the necessity of what he does, or in its usefulness …

  One kills one’s enemies in war. The Pope blesses cannons and armies. But if an individual murderer, let us say, is a schizophrenic, aren’t all men his enemies?

  This has been said so much better, so often!

  Why does one persist in living and in thinking, in teaching others to think ‘as if’?

  But who is ‘one’, since those who invent morals, who teach them, who define them or impose them, believe or end by believing in them?

  Nixon really believes himself the champion of the United States, de Gaulle the rebuilder of France. Nobody locks them up. If they were not their own dupes at the beginning, I would swear they have become so.

  Like my count, with his collection plate by the telephone and his spoiled fish for the servants.

  In short, no tyrant and no victim. Only victims. This is almost what I wanted to say. Only almost.

  Thursday, 4 August

  (The rest, and, I hope, the end of this subject, which is beginning to sound more and more like vacation homework. In fact it is, since we’re still in Venice. We’re leaving Saturday morning, and I will go back to my usual thoughts again in my study.)

  The first man who declared himself king by divine right was no doubt neither a swindler nor even a man of ambition in the usual sense of the word. He believed himself king by divine right. Many around him believed that he was, some, most probably, pretended to believe it out of self-interest. And they then discovered that it was their duty to continue to pretend. Their duty to serve.

  Jesus must also have believed that he was the son of God. But he did come to doubt it.

  Perhaps this is the real tragedy. They all came to doubt. Their followers, their ‘faithful’, prevented them from reversing their stand.

  After that, many men believed themselves kings, emperors, or gods. Most of them were shut up in psychiatric hospitals. They came too late. They were imitators.

  The use the Russians have made of Pavlov’s theory is much discussed, including its use in surgery, in which they use conditioned reflexes to replace anaesthesia.

  For centuries the Catholic Church, and before it other religions (less systematically, less well), used the same principle.

  If you don’t believe, or if you doubt, pray. Recite sentences to a prescribed rhythm. Music. On your knees. Stand. On your knees. Bow your head …

  People talk about their brainwashing, too.

  In religion, it begins with baptism, catechism, first communion, etc. On waking, at table, before and after meals, at noon, at night …

  ‘I am guilty.’

  By my birth as a human being, I am guilty, each day, at each hour. According to the day, the Gospel, the time of the year, I am torn between hope and despair, between paradise and hell, between evil and good.

  The child, the young man, the young woman, the father, the mother, the old man, the dying, all are guilty, and ceremonies absolve them, stage by stage.

  Bear children in pain … Earn one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow … The eternal flames of hell after suffering the death throes …

  A mechanism admirably designed to leave the faithful no time for recollection and barely time to live.

  Whatever you do, you’re guilty, and you must confess.

  If this mechanism had been set in motion cynically by a man or a group of men to ensure profit and power, it would show admirable intelligence and, as we say today, efficiency.

  But no! I don’t think so. That posits supermen.

  At each stage someone really believed it … And the edifice was erected little by little.

  The same goes for kingship, and also for the economic system.

  The day when de Gaulle no longer believes he is de Gaulle, he will be locked up.

  Napoleon at Saint Helena continued to believe he was Napoleon. He pestered his guards with ridiculous demands, subjected his entourage to idiotic protocol, dictated a Memorial which defied good sense. As a result the English consider him one of the greatest men in History, and in Paris he occupies the insane mausoleum which he prepared for himself while still living.

  What would have happened if he had had second thoughts, or rather if he had allowed his doubt to show?

  He would have shared Hitler’s fate, no doubt. And I’m not sure that Hitler will not one day be apotheosized.

  Same day

  It was Clérambault, I believe (I read Romain Rolland’s book thirty years ago), who, when war was declared in 1914, read the mobilization posters without emotional reaction. He was ‘against’. Then a military band went by and he noticed that he was falling in step with the soldiers.

  I’ve often had to resist. It’s the easy solution. There are moments when non-commitment passes for treason and when all the world is against one.

  Every ‘ideal’ ends in a more or less fierce struggle against those who do not share it. Even religions have inspired massacres.

  I feel myself nearer to the Cro-Magnon man than the man of the Renaissance, for whom life (the life of others, of course) counted so little. And even the Cro-Magnon man is too close. The cave paintings show us that man was already proud of killing – animals, to be sure, but still killing. One must go even further back.

  A family of gorillas in a film gave me the deepest thrill, and I was not thinking of Darwin, I was struck by a sort of grave nobility.

  No animal called wild has yet gone hunting in order to line up a large number of ‘trophies’ for pleasure.

  Does one see a lion proudly aligning thirty or forty antelopes which it will not eat?

  I know all this is trite, confused. The basic truths have been formulated time and again, and excellently. So well, indeed, that I mistrust them. All proverbs contradict each other. So do the Gospels, and the Church is so well aware of it that voluminous tomes try to prove that these contradictions aren’t contradictions.

  La Bruyère’s Les Caractères, which are so admired, seem to me false because they try to condense the truth.

  Intelligence explains all. Falsely. As if it were arithmetic.

  I prefer to grope around a little idea until I feel some answer. But, if that more or less succeeds in my novels, I have the feeling here that I’m getting nowhere. More serious, I continue to seek for something without ever feeling satisfied.

  No doubt I was wrong to begin this notebook, which risks infecting me with a passion for reflection. This would be catastrophic. It reassured me a bit that these pages are without importance and that I have the option of burning them.

  It amuses me, though, to blacken them and to see them accumulate.

  Echandens, Sunday, 7 August

  In my study again. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve stayed in my study (I should say the first study where …) outside working hours. Is it age? Is it the study itself that seems really ‘mine’?

  Yesterday, by train, Venice–Lausanne, with my wife, Johnny, Marie-Jo, and a young neighbour who has been nurse for the two children during our vacation. Five people. I had reserved the six seats of a first-class compartment. But the train was jammed as the ones in cartoons, and as only Italian trains are. The corridors filled with travellers and luggage, trunks, bags, parcels of all kinds, with old men, with children. There seemed to be several layers, and it was impossible to get to the washrooms, which were blocked off by passengers and full of luggage besides.

  There was an empty seat in our compartment. Children were standing in the corridor. I knew that Marie-Jo would be train-sick during the trip and would have to lie down. But, even without that, we still wouldn’t have offered the seat to anyone. All the time I had a bad conscience. At the same time I was furious that I was forced to travel under such bad conditions.

  I’m no longer able to stay in a hotel where I haven’t a private bath and perfect service; I can’t even eat i
n a bistro.

  Why? As a child, I didn’t have running water in my room, or any toilet except down in the courtyard. I suffered from the odour of chamber pots and pails. We washed ‘down there’ only once a week, on Saturday, in the kitchen, in a washtub. A shirt and pair of socks a week.

  In those days, miners left work without having taken a shower, with black faces and white eyes. They called themselves Black Mugs.

  Today they have showers, and often own their own homes.

  An English MP said recently on television:

  ‘What weakens the Labour Party is the worker’s acquisition of property. He has no more wants and he becomes conservative …’

  Not only have the people become conservative, but they have adopted bourgeois morals and taboos.

  At one time, it seems to me, the two extremes of society, the little man and the great landowners or the aristocrats, more or less escaped the narrow morality of the middle classes. Then the lower rose, the higher descended. The middle class expanded on both sides and, with it, bourgeois taboos.

  Everyone owns something, a bank account, a house, a car … So everyone has something to defend.

  Against whom?

  I don’t know any more where I was heading. Probably nowhere. It’s unclear. This is connected with everything I’ve written up to now, but the connections are vague.

  For example, a decree is issued (not a law, a decree, because France has gone back to decrees) limiting the freedom of the press. Virtually no newspaper protests.

  The whole world knows that it is a financial cartel, the Union of Mines, which this very morning stands in the way of peace in the Congo and creates a dangerous situation. The deception is obvious. It has been exposed in the papers, or at least in some of them. The Belgians, when forced to do so, gave freedom to the Congo. But one of their straw men, named Tshombe, declared that Katanga too was free.

  France claims that it is vital for her to keep Algeria.

  However, without Katanga, the Congo isn’t viable.

  It’s been almost a week since everyone agreed on this point and the UN was supposed to enter Katanga yesterday.

  It didn’t.

  You don’t risk a ‘holy war’ with the blacks in Africa.

  What happened? To what propaganda or blackmail do we owe this reversal?

  This also is connected with my Black Mugs from the coal mines of Liège at the beginning of the century, and with my travel experience yesterday.

  ‘It is harder for the rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.’

  I have often thought of that Gospel saying. I am often ashamed, as I was yesterday. I wonder if I don’t act dishonourably by raising my children in what is called luxury.

  If I were alone, wouldn’t I renounce it? I’ve been tempted to; I often still am. I live with my convictions and my instinct at odds. It is possible that this causes me twinges of conscience. Anyway it makes me uneasy. I make peace with my conscience, like the rest of the world, telling myself that otherwise I couldn’t work, that I’m not harming anyone, that at this stage of the evolution of the world, it’s natural that …

  It isn’t true. And it’s just because others make the same compromises that …

  On the other hand I know that equality does not exist, that a semblance of equality is possible only by levelling inequalities. I recognize the biological necessity of a natural solution which this equality is about to abolish.

  However, this is not enough to set me at ease. I write this in a manor house built for a seventeenth-century family, for an almost all-powerful bailiff, since there are three prisons at the far end of the courtyard. And, for three years now, I have gone to the greatest trouble to make each room perfect, each wall beautiful to the eye, each piece of furniture a little marvel.

  It’s still allowed. By whom?

  Afternoon

  Perhaps this too is connected with what goes before. Lying down for a short nap, a flash of the kind of place for which I have most nostalgia came to me. There aren’t many left in the world. Thirty years ago in Equatorial Africa, in the South Seas, it was called a general store. I know they have changed since. One still finds a few, under the name of Trading Posts, in some obscure corners of the United States and Canada.

  There men who live more or less in isolation within a ten to a hundred kilometres’ perimeter come once a week, once a month, or twice a year to buy whatever is needed in their life. Matches, for example. Gasoline or carbide, storm lamps, soap, fishhooks or cartridges, wool blankets, rough clothing, leather or rubber boots, thread, needles …

  Merchandise is piled up in casks, in barrels, in cases. It hangs from the ceiling. There is liquor to be had there too, of course.

  Necessities. Not things you’re made to buy because someone needs to sell them. Today, a French minister announced that each Frenchman should eat three more kilos of tomatoes this year than in previous years to prevent a slump. (Thirteen kilos instead of ten!)

  Two wars, more precisely two occupations, have taught me the true value of provisions, the satisfaction of possessing them when it is almost a question of survival. Sugar, for example. Sugar with a capital s. During the last war, afraid of a shortage, especially for my son (I had only one at that time), I bought beehives. I sweetened my coffee with honey. The tricks for getting a few litres of gasoline because you couldn’t count on the electricity. Carbide too. Rice, pastry. And, since I had three cows, the search for barbed wire.

  Thick shoes to protect against cold and mud. An overcoat of thick wool or one lined with sheepskin.

  Things took on their real value again. Their real beauty, too. The beauty – and also the odour – of a barrel of black soap, for example, and of beginning the winter knowing that we wouldn’t be cold, caressing the woodpile with our eyes.

  This atmosphere of ‘stores’ I already knew as a child, in a city, however, at my Aunt Maria’s house beside the canal at Coronmeuse. I’ve often written of it in my novels and in Pedigree. She used to supply the boatmen whose barges were moored above the locks. Boatmen bought what they needed there and my aunt had to stock what they wanted, from Norwegian tar to starch, along with anything else simple, rough people might need.

  The real. This defines as nearly as I can the word ‘real’ for me: that which relates directly to the life of human beings. That which makes it possible.

  The real is never ugly. But as soon as one gets near the realm of the superfluous … See the bazaars, the shops with many counters, etc.

  The place where I would like to live, if I had the courage, or if I had no responsibilities, would be a house, a cabin, as real as those stores: essential furniture of pine, partitions of fir, a stove, a pump in a corner, maybe a shelf for books …

  This environment is artificially manufactured today, and those for whom these places, called camps, are built, in the United States, in Canada, in Kenya, in Polynesia, are the people who have the most money, the most responsibilities, those who are called billionaires and who relax by fishing, cooking their own meals, and making their own beds.

  On a more modest scale, the ordinary camper does very nearly the same thing.

  Hence this must be a virtually general need, this return to the real, but a prefabricated real. Why does the word ‘lard’ suddenly make my mouth water? I haven’t eaten it since the war of ’14–’18. I see it again, spread on black bread. It meant a fatty substance. We no longer need fatty substances. Eating it, we had the sense of protecting ourselves.

  Compared with this, how artificial and joyless gastronomy seems!

  Another memory of war, of the second, this time, 1939–1945. At La Rochelle I directed the Belgian refugee service and I had the right to requisition – among other things – unoccupied apartments or insufficiently occupied ones. Women with children, babies, the sick, the old were sleeping on straw.

  A woman whom I knew well, a so-called friend (I use this word too, but it has no meaning for me), urge
d me:

  ‘Be sure to send me nice people!’

  Some day I must take time to explain myself on the question of money which preoccupies so many journalists who interview me. My position is rather complicated. I’ve often thought of it. I would like to get as close to the truth as possible and it is for fear of not being precise enough that I always hesitate. It will come.

  I’ve been reunited with my son Pierre and already I find it hard to believe that he has walked only for a month. Soon I will find it improbable that there was a time when he was unable to talk.

  God! How fast it goes. And how one worries over useless concerns.

  The man seated on the threshold of his cabin who watches the sun set and does not think.

  And the gorilla, surrounded by his family, on the watch in the forest.

  He is already one step above the man in the cabin, isn’t he? He doesn’t need matches.

  Monday, 8 August

  No doubt I’m going to write some more nonsense. But won’t this whole notebook seem childish? That’s what it’s for, after all, to get rid of all the silly ideas that pass through my head. And I’m trying to forget all philosophical works, and avoid their vocabulary on purpose.

  We tend to be sentimental; at any rate we look – at least most of us – on little children and the dying with compassion.

  Between these two poles, for the being that is no longer a child and not yet dying, we have a tendency to be strict, even to be aggressive.

  And yet they are the same beings, only at different stages.

  Is it because at these two stages they do not compete with us, if I may put it this way?

  There is another explanation. The child and the person in the process of dying are, as it were, beings in their natural state, undisguised.

  As adolescents or adults, other factors will be added to their natural state: education, instruction, profession, environment, nationality, etc.