“Are you still working in the clerks’ office, Mr. Walser?”
Joseph responded by nodding his head and smiling. Clairie also worked for a company owned by Leo Vast. During the day, the two of them went through the same sorts of movements and followed the same sorts of ritual.
“Companions in slavery,” joked Walser.
Clairie smiled.
After a few brief words, Clairie said good-bye. Joseph Walser didn’t move a single foot forward; he turned around and stood watching the movement of Clairie’s buttocks as she walked away. Without spending even a second on formulating a plan, Walser, excited, took a few small, quick steps toward Clairie (while at the same time instinctively hiding his deformed right hand at the side of his body) and called out to her, in a tone of voice that, in a different situation, would have filled him with shame.
“Ms. Clairie!”
Clairie stopped and turned around. She smiled.
“Yes?”
Walser was absolutely overwrought and, sensing some encouragement in her smile, whispered:
“Ms. Clairie, I need to say something to you, something that I’ve kept hidden for a long time. Something that has to do with my affections, Ms. Clairie, something that has to do with powerful feelings.”
2
“Behave yourself, Mr. Walser. We’re in the middle of the street,” said Clairie. “Certain things should never be said to a woman regardless of the situation, much less in this one. My husband just recently died, and you, sir, were one of his friends. I’m still in mourning.”
And then, suddenly, she asked:
“Mr. Walser, why didn’t you show up for the game that night?”
Walser didn’t respond. Clairie turned around and quickly walked away.
“Stupid woman,” murmured Joseph Walser, before taking one last look at the movement of Clairie’s buttocks.
Meanwhile, two soldiers came up to him.
Joseph straightened his posture, proceeded to perform a protracted and respectful gesture in their direction, and only then started off again.
CHAPTER XIX
1
The danger of the current situation had a visible effect on the suppression of individual personalities — in their prominence. “Any man who lets himself get too close to current circumstances,” Klober sometimes said, “might end up engaged in the conversation.”
Every event that became fixed in one’s individual memory was, for Klober, nothing less than the remote consequence of a balancing act: you see, the acts of living beings, beings endowed with a degree of intellectual willpower, so to speak, either interfere with immovable objects, or not; and from this interaction between two worlds there must follow a specific result, naturally, an objective effect that — if only there were methods for measuring practical experience scientifically, methods as refined as those that operate in certain laboratories — could even be expressed by a concrete, a precise number, one that would be immediately understood everywhere. But since such was not the case — that is, since individual perception resists codification into an objective science able to observe and explain its inner workings, each individual memory remains just that: individual, different from any other; indeed, marked by a retreat from others. If a collective shared the exact same memory, it wouldn’t be a collective; it would be a single unit of existence. Therefore, to speak about the collective memory of a nation is simple foolishness — but is, at the same time, an excellent political strategy. The History being taught to children was obviously an attempt to establish a formula dictating the organization of memory in those young minds: one that was both limited and quantitative. Learning the History of a country means — if you’re paying attention — losing your individual memory. “It’s being taught History that first begins to destroy a citizen,” said Klober. “It’s no surprise that not a single genius has been born in the last fifty years: who can be creative, truly creative, when he is inebriated with History from an early age?
“My dear Walser,” insisted Klober, “none of those events occurred in the way that they’re talked about, it’s impossible for any verbal description to evoke or explain organic events. Not even images can do it.”
The country was equipped with only two witnesses, each replete with equivocations: neither eyes nor language could hope to perceive even the minimal laws of existence. Two witnesses — eyes and language — that deceive.
Events occur alone, apart from us, uncomprehended; deep down, they are solitary beings — please excuse the ridiculous metaphor, but that’s precisely what they are: no event has ever been perceived to date. From the most significant, national events to the most discreet episodes of an individual’s life: we do not yet have a science that can truly perceive what happens or what has happened. The very precondition of the scientific method destroys the possibility of such objective observation taking place: that absurd idea, still defended, that science is universal, that it must be understood by all individuals in the same way. That meager rendering of causes and effects, those rows of numbers, the crowding in of explanations of some occurrence now reduced to numbers or letters. They stuff a series of individual, unrepeatable facts into a formula and present it to the entire world, saying: here is what happened to a certain man at a specific time and location, here is the summary of it, for all to understand. And, if possible, it is made into Law, or History.
In truth, we really understand very little, or nothing at all, because we reject the idea of an individualized science, of a science that is both geographically and temporally personalized. Since this individual science, although truly necessary, is useless to one’s country, to the world — assuming such things really exist — and since, furthermore, it’s dangerous, because nothing is more divisive than explaining the same event in different ways — and it would end up dividing the very thing that a nation would want to unite: Mankind — the idea of an individual science was, right from the start, made to seem pointless: it isn’t necessary, it’s superfluous, it’s harmful, it should be eliminated, and eventually, as a final measure, forgotten. “These days,” said Klober, “is there anyone who even remembers that anyone might have proposed the development of an individualized science, a science that always comes with a first name attached to it, and that doesn’t bother to engage with any other mode of reason?
“An individualized science,” said Klober, “an isolated explanation of phenomena is, indeed, urgently needed.
“Struggling by oneself is a laudable act, but it depends as much on the particularities of one’s strength as it does the particularities of one’s mind. A crazy person can struggle by himself all he likes, or a man devoid of all capacity to reason; likewise a man with a mediocre intelligence, let him toil away on his own. But a solitary explanation for phenomena requires a different altitude — let’s use that word — of intelligence. Every creative instinct begins with this primeval necessity, which the collective memory would have us forget: we’re creative because we want to find a solitary explanation, an individual explanation, an explanation that has no equal, that has no duplicate, that is impossible to follow — a selfish explanation, some will say, yes, a selfish explanation, of course. To go even further: it’s hatefuclass="underline" it’s an explanation that hates other explanations, that fights against them; but it doesn’t battle them merely to defeat these other explanations, no, it does it to defeat, vanquish, and eliminate the very men who harbor other solitary explanations! The solitary explanation, which is individualized science par excellence, at its most extreme, seeks to eliminate all other beings, because it hates them; it hates them simply because any other intelligence, any other possibility for solitude, are proof that we do not inhabit this world alone.