“There is only one true non-collective being, or asocial being, as it’s sometimes called. And this being isn’t someone who isolates itself, isn’t someone who runs off into the mountains or the forest, no, it is a being that kills other beings, the one who wants to kill all other ones so it can finally be alone: this is the true solitary being. The other ones, the ones that run off into the mountains or the forest, they’re not solitary beings at alclass="underline" they’re cowards. The same goes for those who won’t leave their houses until the war is over. Don’t leave the forest until your life is over: this is the brilliant formula that some sages have used to resolve the question of existence! No, my dear Walser, you’re either ready to hate other people as much as possible or you should have never bothered to become strong in the first place, for, you see, you are not yet sufficiently individual. Hatred is the great emblem of Man, of his true particularity, his display of difference, his separation from other things. It is your hatred that gives you your name. Your mother, your father — those who provided you with your body — will only recognize you by your hatred. Let’s not allow ourselves to be deceived by morality or by the History of a country, which, deep down, are two identical forces: morality and History are just two ways that the collective, your country, tells you, or asks you, to cease to exist. Cease to exist, says the collective morality!
“And that is where war comes into play, as you must have already noticed,” continued Klober, “for war comes closer than anything to the true nature of Man, and that’s why people are so frightened by it. But this war, like all the others, still isn’t man’s ultimate truth, it still isn’t a procedure that’s capable of completely eliminating the possibility of deceit; the final war, the true one, far removed from the mere imitation before us, will be one in which each man battles against every other man, in which each man will make up the entirety of his own individual army; the true war, the precise war, the war that will finally demonstrate what it is to be an individual, that war, which has not yet taken place, which has barely been dreamed of, but which shall come, I’m sure of it, that war is one in which any two bodies that approach each other will do so out of hate. Any two people who approach one another will do so in order to kill — or else we will still have yet to see true Men.”
CHAPTER XX
1
Not six months had passed since their brief, unpleasant conversation, when Clairie, on some flimsy pretext, asked Walser to pay a visit to her house, which, for a single woman, at once revealed an abrupt diminution of her sense of propriety.
The widow had taken down all the photographs of Fluzst. There wasn’t a single trace of her former husband.
“I’ve made some changes to the house,” said Clairie, “I wanted you to see it, Mr. Walser.”
Walser looked all around him. Clairie moved toward him.
“I hope you aren’t upset with me, Mr. Walser. I was too harsh with you that day.”
Clairie moved even closer to him. Walser whispered:
“Margha is expecting me.”
Clairie leaned towards Walser’s face and kissed it.
“I hope you’ll drop by often, the way you used to,” she said.
2
On his way home — after that first kiss from Clairie — Joseph Walser was thinking about something else. On some other plane of existence, we might say.
He was excited, but this excitement came from inside him. Walser couldn’t stop thinking about something that Klober had said in public once, in front of four or five men, with an expression on his face that made it seem as though he was taking great pride in having the courage to say such things:
“The great mass murderers in History didn’t hate enough. There was always someone on their side. They were never truly alone,” Klober had said.
“They possessed what any rational man would have to call ‘an unfinished hatred,’ or ‘an incomplete hatred.’
“No,” Klober had said, “that is not enough.”
CHAPTER XXI
1
Something had recently become very clear to Walser: he was not a Great Man. He didn’t even need any proof: the contrary assertion had never even reached the stage of hypothesis; as such, this fact was essentially an encumbrance imposed upon him by existence: he was a common man, a man that belonged to a never-ending species that had roamed the world for centuries, replete with new ideas and instruments.
This expression frightened him a little; thus, he paused before it as if it were an object — a material, concrete obstacle blocking his way; there it is again: an endless species. He, Joseph Walser, by virtue of being a common man, belonged to an endless species. And, oh, how it frightened him to think about that endlessness. He almost whispered, pathetically: I want to get off. Because, in fact, it sometimes seemed to him impossible to get off, to abandon this endlessness. How can I depart from it?
From an early age it had been clear to him that he didn’t want to be a protagonist, just a witness. And his difficulty with existence lay in precisely this concrete problem: on many occasions Walser had seen himself, from a distance, being happy; just as he had also observed, from a distance, his own sadness or exasperation. Nothing more. But he was never able to get outside of his own indifference; to get outside of himself in those innumerable moments when he found himself neutral in front of everything, inert and simply waiting when faced with the possibility of some action or its reverse. The more excitement contained in his body, the easier it was to distance himself, to be a witness of himself. The difficulties with this privileged observation — this observation of an existence that was nominally his own — arose, then, most powerfully, when the intensity of his feelings was almost null. If he was already unable to get there—outside himself, yet still within existence — how would he ever be able to distance himself farther still? And what, in concrete terms, was this there, this other place that sometimes seemed to be the very center of his being and at other times its periphery? As to the general location of this there, Walser didn’t have a doubt about it: it was his brain. It was there that everything took place, or where everything that took place was observed. Everything was done there, and everything that was done was observed there. Just like for any average lunatic, thought Walser, and he smiled at this formulation.
Indeed, he was one Man among endless men, a common Man; but how many great men were there? How many great men had there been during the century that was coming to a close? And would we even know how to count them? Would we have an arithmetic sufficient to detect their greatness and quantify it? Would all those men turn out to be public figures, men whose individual acts had prevented catastrophes or created them, or else hastened their occurrence? Could a great man go unrecognized as such by his closest neighbor? A great man in disguise, an anonymous great man? A great man who was merely a gardener?
Walser smiled.
What intrigued him was the fact that he, Joseph Walser, had no aspirations in that regard. He didn’t want to be a Great Man. And that was unusual, for he sensed in people — in almost everyone — a hidden, unremitting force that drove them to their actions, as mediocre as these might be, filled with a different sort of passion — that’s the word we’ll use — as if never wavering for a second in their conviction that, sooner or later, the magnificent destiny that awaited them would reveal itself in the light of day, for all to see — from their neighbors to the farthest-flung fellow citizen — and this destiny was this and this alone: to be a Great Man.