Then the revenge of the weak suddenly occurred to me: so this was what it was like? Very well, I shall break my silence and reveal everything. I know that it is ignoble to enter into someone’s confidence and then reveal their secret, but I am going to speak. Say nothing, for love’s sake, say nothing! Keep His shameful secrets to yourself! — but I am determined to speak … to explain what has happened to me. This time I shall not be silenced, I shall reveal what He has done to me. I shall destroy His reputation.
…Who knows … perhaps it was because the world is also a rat and I had thought myself prepared … because I imagined myself to be stronger, and converted love into a mathematical calculation which happened to be wrong. I foolishly believed that, by adding up points of understanding, I was expressing my love. I failed to recognize that it is only by adding up misunderstandings that one comes to love. Just because I felt affection, I thought love would be easy. I felt no desire for solemn love, failing to understand that solemnity makes a ritual of misunderstanding and transforms it into an offering. But I have always been difficult by nature and have always put up a fight. I have always tried to go my own way and still have not learned to give in. And because deep down I want to love what I would choose to love rather than what is there to love. For I am still not myself and my punishment is loving a world which is not itself. Also because I am easily offended. Perhaps I need to be told these things bluntly for I am very stubborn. I am also extremely possessive, which may explain why I was asked with some irony whether I also wanted the rat for myself. For I shall only be able to be the mother of things when I can pick up a dead rat in my hand. Yet I know that I shall never be able to pick up that dead rat without dying my worst death. So let me intone the Magnificat which blindly exalts what it can neither know nor see. Let me adopt the formalities which distance me, because formalities have not wounded my simplicity but rather my pride. For it is my pride at having been born that makes me feel so intimate with the world — this world which still draws a muffled cry from my heart. The rat exists just as I exist, but perhaps neither I nor the rat is capable of being seen by ourselves, for distance makes us equal. Perhaps I must first accept this nature of mine which seeks a rat’s death. Perhaps I consider myself much too delicate simply because I did not commit any crimes. Having suppressed them, I believe my love to be innocent. Perhaps I shall never be able to face the rat until I am able to look into this unruly soul of mine without turning pale. Perhaps I should call the world this habit of mine of being a little of everything. How can I love the world’s grandeur if I am unable to love the dimensions of my own nature? So long as I imagine that God is good simply because I am evil, I shall find myself loving nothing: it will simply be my way of accusing myself. Without even having examined all of myself, I have chosen to love my opposite, whom I wish to call God. I, who shall never get used to myself, have asked the world to spare me any distress. Having succeeded only in forcing myself to submit to myself (for I am so much more inexorable than myself), I hoped to compensate myself with an Earth less violent than myself.
For as long as I love God only because I do not love myself, I shall be a marked dice, and the game of my greater life will not be played. As long as I go on inventing God, He will never exist.
SUNDAY
Such perfume! It is Sunday morning. The terrace has been swept. So he switches on the radio. A late lunch gives one thoughts. He smiles, and gives those thoughts form. There is water on the table but no one is thirsty on a Sunday. And he begins sipping wine without much enthusiasm. At four o’clock they will hoist the flag on the pavilion. (But what he really fears are those tranquil Sunday evenings.)
POSTERITY WILL JUDGE US
When a cure is found to ward off influenza, future generations will no longer be able to understand us. Influenza, while it lasts, is one of the most incurable of organic disorders. Having influenza is to know many things which, if not known, would never need to be known. It is to experience a useless catastrophe, a catastrophe without tragedy. It is a cowardly lament which only another person suffering from influenza can understand. How will future generations ever be able to understand that for us, having influenza was a human condition? We are flu-stricken creatures who will be subjected to censure or ridicule by future generations.
YOUR SECRET
Poisoned flowers in a vase. Red, blue, pink, they carpet the air. How they transform a hospital ward. I have never seen such beautiful and dangerous flowers. So this is your secret. Your secret resembles you so closely that it tells me nothing beyond what I already know. And I know so little, as if I were your enigma. Just as you are mine.
TEN YEARS OLD
— Tomorrow I shall be ten years old. I intend to make the most of this last day of my ninth year.
There is a pause. Sadness.
— Mummy, my soul is not yet ten years old.
— How old then?
— I guess about eight years old.
— Don’t worry, that’s how it should be.
— But I think we should count our years by our soul. People would then say: that chap died at twenty. And the chap had died, but with a seventy-year-old body.
Later he began to sing, then stopped and said:
— I am singing Happy Birthday to myself. But, Mummy, I haven’t really made much of my ten years.
— Yes, you have.
— No, no, I don’t mean much in the sense of doing this and that. What I mean is that I have not really been very happy. What’s wrong? Why are you looking so sad?