‘The day will come when, even to lift to my lips merely the water for which I have the greatest thirst, I shall no longer have enough strength’ — or something close to this. . . . No, that is not the way it happens: along with one’s strength, one’s desires decrease also. If the glass no longer reaches the lips, this is also because the water seems less cool and because one is less thirsty.

A sort of strange moodiness inclines me to give up suddenly what would be most agreeable to me and what occasionally I have most consistently longed for; for the advantage of some indefinable superior satisfaction, it must be supposed, of an almost mystical nature . . . ? I don’t really know. — Isn’t it this that already, in the pilgrimage I made to the Grande-Chartreuse at the age of twenty, turned me away at the last moment by some secret dissuasion, so that, on the point of reaching my objective, I turned about and started off intoxicated with a different satisfaction and as if enriched by that privation. That sort of maceration plunged me at that time into a state of ineffable lyricism.

Is not unrelated, I believe, with solitary practices which invite dream to dominate reality, so that one comes to prefer imaginary possession to real possession.

Certainly Christ and his disciples on their way to Jerusalem were marching toward triumph — Christ with the certainty of his divine vocation. There was, in the eyes of the world at least, complete failure. This is the first thing that it was important to save. It was essential to work for the justification of the cross, of the torment, of the ignominy to which that career seemed to lead. It was essential to show that that end had been foreseen, show that it was necessary to the accomplishment of the Scriptures and likewise to the salvation of humanity. And that Christ died because of sinners, or for sinners . . . the distinction was mystically so delicate that it was easy to pass from one to the other and that a happy confusion grew up in favour of St Paul’s preaching. People ceased to see Christ anywhere save on the cross; the cross became the indispensable symbol. It was the mark of ignominy that it was important to glorify most. Only thus could appear as triumphant, in spite of everything, the work of the one who had called himself the Son of God.

That was indispensable in the beginning; for the official recognition and propagation of the doctrine.

But, after all, that ignominious end, though it became indispensable to the dogma, was in no wise a part of the very teaching of Christ. It was on the contrary its check, or rather the supreme obstacle over which the lesson of happiness (see the words spoken on the cross) was likewise to triumph.

No matter: once that doctrine had mastered minds and hearts — that is to say, when people felt they had a right to seek out Christ before the torment, and in the fullness of his joy — it was too late: the cross had overcome Christ himself; it was Christ crucified that people continued to see and to teach.

And thus it is that that religion came to plunge the world into gloom.

Few sentences have vexed me as much as this one: ‘What is everything that is not eternal?’ What an absurd conception of the world and of life manages to cause three quarters of our unhappiness! Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow’s joy is possible only if today’s makes way for it: that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one; that each flower owes it to itself to fade for the sake of its fruit; that the fruit, unless it falls and dies, cannot assure new blooms, so that spring itself rests on winter’s grief.

The lack of curiosity of the flesh which preceeds by far impotence and even the dying-out of desires, which makes the latter compromise and even ease their domination, no, it is not apathy; but, the mind resuming the upper hand, it leaves the way open for moralizing.

Close and stingy . . . yes, I know that I am; and I admit that I am to excess. But this is because I prefer with all my heart being able to give what they who call me a miser are so willing to spend on themselves.

Met Valéry the eve of my departure for Le Tertre; that is, Saturday, the last day of July (?). In the back of the N.R.F. shop he was autographing some copies of the reprint of Teste. He took me by the arm and accompanied me to the corner of the rue de Bellechasse and the boulevard Saint-Germain. We even walked up and down in front of the Ministry of War until the stroke of twelve thirty reminded him that he was expected for lunch. More intelligent, more charming, more affectionate than ever. Yet I leave that meeting rather depressed, as from almost all other meetings with Valéry. But this time it is not so much feeling an intelligence so incomparably superior to mine attach no value to the commodities I can supply, accept only the coin of which I am most bereft; no, it was not that frightful feeling of insolvency (which used to drive me to despair), but a much more subtle feeling, a close relative of the one I tried to note yesterday. Valéry, on the contrary, is closely attached to life. He relates to me his conversations with Marshals Foch and Pétain: he always says exactly what is appropriate to say, which is always a bit more and a bit different from what one expects. He tells of Barthou’s petty intrigues to take away from him the speech of welcome for Pétain, which Valéry is to pronounce, but which Barthou would be glad to pronounce in his place ‘if it just happened that it bored you or that you felt tired’. He is playing his life like a game of chess that it is important to win, and as he writes his poems, placing just the right word, as one moves up a pawn, in just the right place. He has managed his life so well that mine, in comparison, seems to me but a sorry succession of blunders. I remember that, still quite young, Valéry said to me: ‘If I wanted to be rich, it would be in order to be able, always and in any society of circumstance whatever, to wear the appropriate costume. . . .’

What is he doing? Where is he? Is he thinking of me? Is he telling himself perhaps that I am forgetting him? . . . This constant interrogation plays a muffled accompaniment to all my thoughts. 

It seems to me that in the whole affiair of little Émile I let myself be taken in most absurdly. This is just because I was unwilling to look upon it as a game (which is the surest means of all of letting oneself be taken in) — and this is why it is all so painful to me today. We should be half cured of a love-affair if we could convince ourself that the person with whom we are in love is, after all, but a rather ordinary creature. The strength of the attachment comes from the gnawing conviction that there is something exceptional, unique, irreplaceable in the beloved, which we shall never again find.

I knew someone who was plunged into black melancholy at the mere thought of having to replace, soon and from time to time, the pair of shoes he was wearing; and likewise his clothing, his hat, his linen, his necktie. This was not an evidence of avarice, but a sort of anguish at not being able to reply on anything durable, definitive, anything absolute.

Élizabeth V. R., who is amazed to see little Catherine so disinclined to miss La Bastide, tries to question her on this subject. Is it a lack of memory? No, she remembers everything.

‘You didn’t like La Bastide, then?’

‘Oh, yes! Very much.’

‘But tell me . . . where do you most like to be?’

The question seems so off to the child that at first she appears to be disconcerted.

Then, in her most natural voice, and as if it couldn’t be otherwise: 

‘Why . . . wherever I am.’

When I am feeling well, this kind of thing has no effect on me; but as soon as I am weak, such hateful tales rise up within me and I suffer to feel such stupidity and hatred aroused against me. I also fear that such details may cling to my image, since I know so well that falsehood is more readily credited than truth.

At the table directly opposite us was a rather attractive young couple. Probably a wedding-trip, for the table is covered with flowers. The young man was reading Les Caves du Vatican. This is the first time I have ever happened to meet someone actually reading me. (The scene: ‘Oh! Monsieur Duhamel!!’) Occasionally he turned toward me and, when I was not looking at him, I felt him staring at me. Most likely he recognized me. Lacratelle kept telling me: ‘Go ahead! Tell him who you are. Sign his book for him. . . .’ In order to do this I should have had to be more certain he liked the book, in which he remained absorbed even during the meal. But suddenly I saw him take a little knife out of his pocket. . . . Lacretelle was seized with uncontrollable laughter on seeing him slash Les Caves du Vatican. Was he doing so out of exasperation? For a moment I thought so. But no: carefully he cut the binding threads, took out the first few sheets, and handed a whole part of the book that he had already read to his young wife, who immediately plunged into her reading.

Everything I learn today could have been of some advantage to me twenty years earlier; this is what I constantly tell myself, and that the heavier the baggage is, the harder it is to move on when the hour comes. Then I tell myself, immediately afterward that of all fruitless anxieties there is none more fruitless than that of death (though it constantly pursues me) and that the part of wisdom is to go on living without thinking too much that one must die. The constant idea of death, moreover, does not exactly sadden me; on the contrary, I am willing to admit that it should darken my thoughts. But, looking back over my life, what saddens me rather is the thought of the little I have done, the thought of all I might have and should have done. All the books I should have written, so many countries I might have known, so much happiness I might have caused. An unaccountable diffidence, modesty, shyness, reticence, laziness, excessive understanding of the other side, etc., have constantly held me back, unfailingly checked me in mid-course. I have always been paralysed by scruples and by fear of hurting whomever I loved; and nothing is more ruinous when one loves what differs from oneself. 

It goes without saying that I feel all this especially at Cuverville and when with Em. He whose heart is free can go far; I have never been able to keep myself from taking into account everything that kept me from advancing, never resigning myself to going alone and ever more anxious to lead others than to venture forth alone. Real pioneers do not care whether or not they are followed; they go forward without looking back.

In the Congo what joy could I take in gathering unknown flowers with no one to whom to give them?

‘The true scholar (?) is he who is able to find in experience perhaps a reply to what he was seeking, but also to listen to the reply to what he was not asking’; who accepts considering even what he did not expect to see, were it to surprise and embarrass him considerably. The Cartesian does not accept ever being surprised. In short, he does not accept being taught.

To cease to take oneself into consideration for days, weeks, months. Lose sight of oneself. It amounts to going through a long tunnel beyond which one can hope to find a new landscape. . . . I have often feared an uninterrupted consciousness might attach our future too logically to our past, might prevent becoming. Night and sleep alone permit metamorphoses; without oblivion in the chrysalis, the caterpillar could not become a butterfly. The hope of awaking someone else urges me to let the man I am sink into sleep.

I should like to enjoy this summer flower by flower

Fish die belly-upward and rise to the surface; it is their way of falling. 

D E A R F R I E N D,

Many wild animals do not die in silence: the lion and the leopard roar; many antelopes, and particularly gazelles, bleat plaintively; the rhinoceros squeaks (a faint mouse’s squeak, extraordinary from such a big carcass); our African hares cry out too; jackals, bush-dogs bark and howl. Is it from pain? Is it from fear of a new wound or of death? That is another question; but they do not keep silent in their agony.

Nor the buffalo (which I was forgetting) either.

I have never killed any wolves.

Yours,

C O P P E T [A.]

Never have I been able to settle in life. Always seated askew, as if on the arm of a chair; ready to get up, to leave.

X. told me he had recently met Franz Blei in Berlin. The old bohemian still seems extraordinarily hale and hearty; and when X. congratulated him on this, Blei, leaning toward him, whispered: 

‘I’ll tell you my secret: No sports!’