XII
When it comes to the Atlantic, one tends to exclaim: the Ocean! the “Ocean!” Rolling one’s inner eyes.
Meanwhile, on land, there appeared a puny form of life, low to the ground, a rat-like thing whose nibble was barely perceptible, a creature somewhat blurred, all fur, all scurry; followed by silence. The life of A., one of these nondescript existences—and yet the Ocean!, the Ocean!—making his way, going where? And his self a mystery.
♦
He wonders where his life lies, sometimes it seems to him that it lies ahead of him, rarely in the past or present, something still to be pursued. He paws at it, he turns it this way and that, he tries it out; not that he sees it.
And yet this is his life.
More limpid than empty, more arrowy than limpid, and, still more so, atmospheric.
♦
He searches for youth in the process of aging. This is what he’d hoped for. He’s still waiting. But soon he shall die.
♦
It’s everybody else’s fault. This is certain. But how is he to live? Action must always precede knowledge . . .
♦
Until the onset of adolescence, he formed a bubble, a hermetic, self-sufficient bubble, a dense, personal, murky universe into which nothing made its way, neither parents nor feelings, neither objects nor their images nor their very existence, unless all these were violently arrayed against him. In short, he was loathed, it was said he would never make it as a man.
He was no doubt destined to become a saint. His condition was already among the rarest. He subsisted, as they say, on nothing, without ever weakening, resolutely relying on the minimum, feeling himself traversed by long trains of mysterious matter.
But the doctors hounded him to eat and give in to his natural needs, such was their deep conviction. Having sent him far away to live among foreign rascals and stinky peasants, they managed to defeat him, up to a point. His oh-so-perfect bubble anastomized and even perceptibly disintegrated.
♦
His father’s ideal was: to withdraw. He never had anything to offer. He was cautious, very cautious, even-tempered in his despondency. He would erase himself like a blemish. Sometimes he would work himself up into awesome fits of rage, painful, extremely rare, like those of an elephant who, abandoning years of acquiescence to surveillance, suddenly bursts into anger for a bagatelle.
♦
To dislocate the bubble, there were also the freezing temperatures and the north wind, so harsh and sovereign in this land so perfectly flat, through which it cuts like a razor.
No one was ever seized with joy when it came to him.
♦
A great languor, the bubble. A great languor, a great slowness; a weighty rotation. An inertia, a mastery, an assurance. This particularly stable thing that one encounters fairly frequently in vices or in diseased states.
♦
Thick Buddha lips, closed to bread, closed to speech.
♦
The bubble thus lost its perfection.
Perfection lost, comes nutrition, comes nutrition and comprehension. At the age of seven, he learned the alphabet and partook of food.
♦
His first thoughts were of the person of God.
God is a bubble. God is. Is natural. Must be. Is perfection. Is the only thing conceivable. Is. Is, moreover, immense.
♦
He lived for years, eyes on his inner basin.
♦
The divine is nature. Immediate things are nature. Tran-substantiation is nature. Miracles are nature. Miracles, levitation. Perfect joy. Fusion in love is nature. The liberation of the soul.
♦
The fall of man, our story. The loss of sight of God, our story. Our punishment, our story. The cross, our miseries, our efforts, our inabilities to rise, our hopes.
Our story and our explanation.
♦
How the Spaniards stand in need of the idea of sin and of the martyred Christ, the abject object of the most cruel and unjust treatments ever known, and how this race destined for tragedy would never have reached fulfillment had this staggering companion not accompanied it; which is why the notion of paradise lost and of the fall of man proved so necessary.
A.: postlapsarian man.
♦
Things are a façade, a crust. Only God is. But there is something divine in books.
The world is a mystery, plain things are a mystery, stones and plants. But books might well contain an explanation, a key.
Things are hard, matter and humans are hard, irrevocable.
A book is supple, untrammeled. A book is not a crust. It is a ball of light. The filthiest of books, the thickest of books, a ball of light. Pure. Soulful. Divine. Self-abandoning.
♦
All in all, books were his experience.
♦
His attention span was short, and even when interested in something, he noticed little, as if only an outer layer of attention were opening in him, but not his “self.” He just stood there, shifting his weight back and forth. He would read a great deal, very quickly and very poorly. This is the form his attention took. For inasmuch as his essence remained undecided and mysterious and ill-defined, his attention was attracted by this same elusive shapeless universe in books. Reading in his fashion, even a math textbook or a François Coppée poem became a nebula.
And if he tried to read slowly, to “grasp” the subject: nothing! It was as if he were facing blank pages. But he was quite capable of rereading, as long as he went fast, as can easily be imagined. He thereby managed to create a new and different nebula. And the sympathy derived from this pleasant memory immediately sustained him.
♦
What he searches for in books is revelation. He skims through them. Suddenly, to his great delight, a sentence . . . an incident . . . whatever . . . something there . . . At which point he proceeds to levitate toward this something with everything that he has within him, at times clinging to it as iron to magnet. He calls out to his other notions: “Come take a look! Come take a look!” He lingers there for a certain span among the vortices, among the coils, amid a clarity that declares: “Here it is!” After a stretch of time, bit by bit, piece by piece, he detaches himself, falls back a little, falls back considerably more, but never as far down as he was at the outset. He has gained something. He has made himself somewhat superior to himself.
He had always thought that one more idea was not an addition. No, a drunken disorder, a loss of composure, a flare, several of these, then an overall ascension.
Books provided him with several revelations. Here is one of them: atoms. Atoms, tiny gods. The world is not a façade, a crust, an appearance. The world is: atoms are. Innumerable tiny gods.
♦
Ah! To understand the world this time around, or never!
♦
Years pass . . .
Infinite chains of atoms to the world.
Infinite imaginings of reflection, of explanation.
Years pass.
His eyes begin popping out of his head.
Disappointing atoms.
♦
Immense, monotonous field of knowledge. Tied into the tiny gods. The way the French language intercepts the genius of German and, in general, everything un-French . . .
Unilateral, always prisoned by perfection.
♦
One day, at age twenty, he underwent a sudden illumination. He became aware, at long last, of the anti-life he was living and that he had to start from the other end. To go in search of another residence, to leave behind his modest abode. So he set off.
♦
This did not involve orienting his life, it involved ripping it apart. If a contemplative throws himself into the water, he will not attempt to swim, he will first attempt to understand the water. And therefore drown.
(This is why advice-givers should be on their guard.)
♦
Poor A., what are you doing in America? Months pass; suffer; suffer. What are you doing on this boat? Months pass; suffer, suffer. Teacher, what are you doing? Months pass, suffer, suffer. Teacher, what are you doing? Months pass. Suffer, suffer. Journalist, what are you doing? Months pass. Suffer, suffer, figure out all the angles, for this shall be your life. Well not all the angles, especially the lowest of angles, for this shall be your life.
♦
He does not overestimate himself. He has been suddenly struck by the implacable realization of his inadequacy. Which eats up his last remaining shred of mental health. All it took was a week. He became extraordinarily small.
♦
Shame. Shame does not cry out. Shame chills. Nothing is temporary in him. When some sort of feeling ripens, it is generalized and immediately revives everything similar that has preceded it.
♦
Capable of nothing, one has to be ready for anything. His courage is of this stripe. He is haunted by the idea of action, a paradise impossible given his nature, an unlikely cure.
Every morning he engages in an examination of his conscience and twists his entire day into the thread of his meditation, and into what strikes him as needing modification, but these are mostly errors or minor missteps on his part.
Every morning he needs to start all over again . . . and he meditates. But then day arrives and he inevitably finds himself overwhelmed.
He would like to act. But the bubble demands perfection, demands the circle, demands rest.
♦
He remains ever restless nonetheless. A muscle emerges from his bubble. Now he is content. He will now be able to walk about like everyone else, but an isolated muscle cannot guarantee locomotion. He quickly grows tired. He no longer budges. Every evening of every day.
His muscles thus twitch in any number of directions, but do not enable him to walk, even though he thinks they will propel him forward. He’s but a bubble. He’s pigheaded. He looks to move. He’s a fetus in a belly. The fetus will never walk, never. It will have to be extracted, which is something altogether different. But he’s pigheaded, being a creature bent on life.
♦
Ocean! Ocean! A. is appointed to a teaching position! Idiocy! The Ocean lies below and hides and defends itself with weapons only the Ocean knows, sheet by sheet, all-enveloping, never moving, yet never being in the same place it was a minute before.
♦
But soon he’ll die . . .