The finest subjects for drama are suggested to us by natural history and particularly by entomology. My Saül was inspired by the odd discovery I had made of the chrysalis of a hawk-moth; it preserved its perfect form with the minute indication of the butterfly that was to issue from it; yet I noted at once that it was not capable of any of those slight quivering movements under the influence of tickling which reveal the latent life of ordinary chrysalises (at least the ones belonging to these butterflies). At the first pressure of my fingers the fragile envelope broke, which preserved but the form of the original animal; under this very thin and fragile sheathing many little cocoons had usurped all the space; they belonged to a sort of sphex, doubtless. . . . And I did not understand how the original animal, now devoured, had been able to find strength enough to achieve this deceptive pupation. Nothing revealed on the outside its total disappearance and the victory of the parasites. Thus, I thought, my Saül would say: ‘I am utterly suppressed.’
And I learn this morning that the caterpillars of the Lycaenidae, after an initial period of vegetarian feeding, are carried off into an anthill by the ants, who enjoy the bit of honey secreted by their dorsal papillae just as they do the milk of the aphis. But, deprived of vegetable food, those caterpillars change their diet and soon devour the entire nest of ant-eggs. Too bad for the ants! Thus it is and only thus and only in the anthill that the development of those caterpillars can reach completion.
Amazing ‘subject’ of a drama! Not of a La Fontaine fable, but of a drama, and here is the first act: the caterpillar, a future butterfly, gets itself invited to the ants’ house; all this, naturally, in the world of men and transposed to our scale.
Without being too impolite, I should like to take leave of myself. I have decidedly seen enough of myself. I no longer even know whether or not I should still like to begin my life over again; or else, I should do so with a little more daring in affirmation. I have sought much too much to please others, greatly sinned through modesty.
I am speaking of the people, of the ‘masses’; for what made me suffer there was seeing the social classes taking shape again despite the vast and bloody effort of the revolution, convention winning out over freedom of thought, and falsehood over reality.
Often I am gnawed by a feeling (which sometimes gets to the point of anguish) that I have something more important to do (than what I am doing and am concerned with at present). If I had to die in an hour, should I be ready?
Yesterday evening I receive this letter from an unknown named Bernard Enginger; it is so significant that I want to set it down here:
For five years I have been wanting to write you. At that time I discovered your Nourritures terrestres; I was seventeen. I could not tell you how it upset me. I have never been the same since. I want to tell you of my respect and my admiration. Hundreds of letters like this one must have reached you. That is not the only thing I wanted to write you.
I struggled against you for five years. Your Ménalque knows enough to say: ‘Leave me.’ That is too easy. I struggled against your spiritual tyranny you exercised over me. I loved you, and certain passages from your books helped me to live in the concentration camps. In you I found the strength to tear myself away from a middle-class, material comfort. With you I sought ‘not so much possession as love’. I cleared myself away to be new for the new law. I liberated myself. That is not enough. ‘Free for what?’ That is the dreadful question. At last I detached myself from you, but I have not found any new masters, and I remain quivering. The terrifying absurdity of the Sartres and the Camuses has solved nothing and merely opens horizons for suicide.
I still live with everything you taught me. But I am thirsty. All young people are thirsty with me. You can do something. And yet I know that one is alone, always.
I do not expect from you a convenient solution for my little problem. That would be too easy, a collective solution. Each one must find his way, which is not the same as his neighbour’s. But a glimmer from you might indicate the direction to take. . . . If there is a direction.
Oh, Maître . . . If you only knew the confusion of all our youth. . . . I do not want to waste your time. I have not said everything I wanted to say. There would be too much to say.
This is an appeal I am throwing out to you. Forgive my awkwardness: I know that you do not like sympathy.
None the less, I want to tell you of my tremendous admiration and the hope I put in you.
Believe me, Maître, faithfully and respectfully yours,
BERNARD ENGINGER
Why seek ‘new masters’? Catholicism or Communism demands, or at least advocates, submission of the mind. Worn out by yesterday’s struggle, young men (and many of their elders) seek and think they have found, in that very submission, rest, assurance, and intellectual comfort. Indeed, they even seek in it a reason for living and convince themselves (let themselves be convinced) that they will be more useful and will achieve their full value when rneolled. Thus it is that, without being really aware of it, or becoming aware of it only too late, through abnegation or laziness, they are going to contribute to the defeat, to the retreat, to the rout of the spirit; to the establishment of some form of other ‘totalitarianism’ which will be hardly any better than the NAzism they were fighting.
The world will be saved, if it can be, only by the unsubmissive. Without them it would be all up with our civilization, our culture, what we loved, and what gave to our presence on earth a secret justification. Those unsubmissive ones are the ‘salt of the earth’ and responsible for God. For I am convinced that God is not yet and that we must achieve him. Could there be a nobler, more admirable role, and more worthy of our efforts?
PS. – Yes, I am well aware that I wrote in my Nourritures: ‘Not sympathy, but love.’ But I too, and before anyone else, following my own advice, ‘left my book’ and went beyond. Even in regard to oneself it is essential not to come to a stop.
Strange part played in that drama by papers and missives, presented, stolen, falsified; up to seven times, if I counted aright.
Hence I shall refuse to consider finality in nature. According to the best advice, I shall everywhere substitute, systematically, the how for the why. For instance, I know (or at least I have been told) that that substance the silkworm discharges while making his cocoon would poison him if he kept it in him. He purges himself of it. To save himself he empties himself. None the less the cocoon, which he is obliged to form under threat of death and which he would be unable either to imagine or to fashion otherwise, protects the metamorphosis and the caterpillar; and the caterpillar cannot become a butterfly unless emptied of that silky poison. . . . But I am indeed forced to at the same time to admire the way in which the how joins the why in this case, fusing with it so intimately and with such a tight interweave that I cannot distinguish one from the other.
And Likewise for the mollusc and its shell. Likewise constantly and everywhere in nature the solution is inseparable from the problem. Or rather: there is no problem; there are only solutions. Man’s mind invents the problem afterward. He sees problems everywhere. It’s screaming.
Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves! And without too many regrets, if possible! Those from which the sap has withdrawn. But, good Lord, what beautiful colours!
What rubbish all that literature is! And even were I to consider only the finest writings, what business have I, when life is here at hand, with these reflections, these carbon copies of life? The only thing that matters to me is what can lead me to modify my way of seeing and acting. Merely living calls for all my courage; merely living in this frightful world. And I know and feel that it is frightful; but I know also that it could be otherwise and that it is what we make it. If you point out the present horror in order to bring about a protest through indignation, through disgust, bravo! But if not, up and at the demoralizers!
When I had learned that little bows of ribbon were called rosettes (how old was I then? five or six . . .) I got hold of a large number of them, in my mother’s workbasket; then, having closed myself in a room far from other’s eyes which might have broken the charm, I laid out on the floor a whole flowerbed, a whole garden of them. Were they not flowers? The word said so. It was enough to believe so. And I strove to do so for a whole quarter of an hour. Did not succeed.
On a childish plane this marked the defeat of nominalism. And perhaps after all I lacked imagination. But above all I recall very well having said to myself: ‘What a fool I am! what is the meaning of this comedy? There is nothing there but bits of ribbon, that is all . . .’ and I went and put them back in my mother’s little basket.
The harshness of the epoch is such that we find it hard to imagine (or, rather, are unwilling to admit) that there could have been such a tragic one at any other moment in history. Better informed, we should perhaps get to the point of being convinced that, quite on the contrary, the exceptional was the long period of toleration in which we lived before the unleashing of the horrors (which decidedly feel at home on earth) – so natural seemed to us that intellectual freedom, so lamentably compromised today. Now a time is returning in which all will be traitors who do not think ‘properly’.
Some, it is true, are still resisting; and they are the only ones who count. It matters little that they are not very numerous: it is in them that the idea of God has taken refuge.
But the temptation that it is hardest to resist, for youth, is that of ‘committing oneself’, as they say. Everything urges them to do so, and the cleverest sophistries, the apparently noblest, the most urgent, motives. One would have accomplished much if one persuaded youth that it is through carelessness and laziness that it commits itself;
. . . if one persuaded youth that it is essential – not to be this or that, but – to be.
However different Valéry, Proust, Suarès, Claudel, and I were from one another, if I look for the way in which we might be recognized to be of the same age, and I was about to say of the same team, I think it is the great scorn we had for the things of the moment. And it was in this way that the more or less secret influence of Mallarmé showed in us. Yes, even Proust in his depiction of what we used to call ‘the contingencies’, and Fargue, who of late has been writing in the newspapers to earn a living, but still with a very clear conviction that art operates in the eternal and debases itself by trying to serve even the noblest causes. I wrote: ‘I call journalism everything that will interest less tomorrow than it does today.’ Consequently nothing seems to me at once more absurd and more justified than the reproach that is directed at me today of never having managed to commit myself. Indeed! And it is in this regard that the leaders of the new generation, who gauge a work according to its immediate efficacy, differ most from us. They also aim for an immediate success, whereas we considered it quite natural to remain unknown, unappreciated, and disdained until after forty-five. We were banking on time, concerned only with forming a lasting work like those we admired, on which time has but little hold and which aspire to seem as moving and timely tomorrow as today.
These last days of life seem the most difficult to live through; but this must be an illusion, for one has only to leave it to time, and to gravity. . . . Valéry used to get angry at the fact that more importance is given to the last moments of a life than to all the rest; this in relation to last-minute conversions.
An extraordinary, an insatiable need to love and be loved, I believe this is what dominated my life and urged me to write; an almost mystical need, moreover, since I consented to its not being satisfied during my lifetime.
‘Will you sing when you are vaporous?’
Accumulation of days in the hospital; vague mass of more than a month; hesitating between better and worse. Succession of days filled almost solely with reading. Sort of desert morass with the daily oasis, charming beyond all hope, of the regular visits of the incomparable friend that, during this long period of purgatory, Roger Martin du Gard was for me. His mere presence already provided me a link with life; he forestalled all the needs of my mind and body; and however gloomy I might have been before his coming, I soon felt quite revived by his remarks and by the affectionate attention he paid to mine. I do not know whether I could ever have been more aware in the past of the ineffable blessing of friendship. And what an effacement (even excessive) of his own interest, of himself! No, no! Religion achieves nothing better, or so naturally.
‘These insignificant lines date from 12 June 1949 [sic]. Everything leads me to think that they will be the last of this Journal. – André Gide. – 25 January 1950.’