Anathemas and Admirations (46 page)

According to Louis de Broglie, there is a relation between
“faire de l’esprit”
and making scientific discoveries,
esprit
here signifying the capacity “spontaneously to establish unexpected comparisons.” If this were so, the Germans would be incapable of innovating with regard to the sciences. Swift himself was amazed that a nation of dullards should have so great a number of inventions to its credit; but invention does not suppose agility so much as perseverance — the capacity to explore, to penetrate, to persist. . . . The spark is struck by obstinacy.

Nothing is tiresome for a man swept on by the craving for investigation. Proof against boredom, he will expatiate endlessly about anything, without sparing, if he is a writer, his readers; without even deigning, if he is a philosopher, to take them into consideration.

I tell an American psychoanalyst that while on a friend’s property, I happened to take a bad fall while I was doing some of my inveterate pruning, struggling with the dry branches of a sequoia. “You were ‘struggling’ with that tree not to prune it, but to punish it for outliving you.. Your secret desire was to take revenge by stripping it of its branches.” Enough to disgust one forever with any
deep
explanation.

Another Yankee, this time a professor, was complaining that he didn’t know what he would discuss in his next year’s lectures,

“Why not chaos and its charms?”

“I don’t know about that — I’ve never been subject to that kind of spell,” he replied. Easier to reach an understanding with a monster than with the contrary of a monster.

I was reading Rimbaud —
Le Bateau ivre
— to someone who didn’t know the poem and who, moreover, was a stranger to poetry itself. “It sounds as if it came from the tertiary age” was his comment, once I had finished reading. As judgments go, not bad.

P. Tz.: a genius if ever there was one. Oral frenzy, out of a horror or an impossibility of writing. Scattered through the Balkans, thousands and thousands of quips, lost forever. How to give a notion of his verve, his passion, his madness? “You’re a mixture of God and Quixote.” I told him once. At the time he was flattered, but the next morning, very early, he came to tell me, “I don’t like that business about Don Quixote.”

From the age of ten to the age of fourteen, I lived in a boarding house. Every morning on my way to school, passing a bookstore, I would glance at the books, which were changed relatively often, even in this provincial Rumanian town. Only one, in the corner of the shop window, seemed to have been forgotten for months:
Bestia umana
(Zola’s
Human Beast)
. Of those four years, the only memory that haunts me is that title.

My
books,
my
work: the grotesquerie of such possessives. Everything was spoiled once literature stopped being anonymous. Decadence dates from the first
author
.

I had decided never again to shake hands with anyone healthy. Yet I have had to compromise, for I soon discovered that many of those I suspected of well-being were less subject to it than I had supposed. What was the use of making enemies on the basis of mere suspicions?

Nothing so hampers continuity of thought as to feel the mind’s insistent pressure. Perhaps this is why the mad think only in
flashes
.

That man in the street — what does he want? Why is he alive? And that child and its mother, and that old man? No one finds favor in my eyes during this accursed promenade. At last I went into a butcher shop, where something like half a calf’s carcass was hanging. At the sight I was quite ready to burst into tears.