STAGES, VOLUME 9

Series Editors

Michael Holquist

Yale University

Warren Motte

University of Colorado at Boulder

Gerald Prince

University of Pennsylvania

Patricia Meyer Spacks

�'if-""'
University of Virginia
The ·Mirror of Ideas

(Le Miroir des ideesj

Michel Tournier

Translated by [onathan F. Krell

University of Nebraska Press

Lincoln and London

Pubhcation of this translation was
assisted by a grant from the French
Ministry of Culture.

© Editions Mercure de France 1994, r996

© 1998 by the
University of Nebraska Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States
of America

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the minimum requirements of
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Library of Congress Cataloging­

in-Publication Data
Tournier, Michel.
[Miroir des idees. English]
The mirror of ideas - Le m.iroir des idees
/ Michel Tournier ; translated by
Jonathan F. Krell.
p. cm. - I Stages ; 9 J Includes index.
ISBN 0-8032-4430-4 {cloth: alk. paper)
I. Krell, Jonathan F., 1952- . TI. Title.
III. Series: Stages ISeriesj; v. 9.
PQ2680.083M57r3 r998
844'.914-dc21 97-23303 CIP
Contents Derision and Celebration 6 6
Memory and Habit 68
Speech and Writing 70
Talent and Genius 72
The Beautiful and the Sublime 7 4
Culture and Civilization 76
Translator's Preface vii The Sign and the Image 78
Introduction 1 Purity and Innocence Bo
ManandWoman 4 Chronology and Meteorology 82
Love and Friendship 6 The Primary and the Secondary 84
Don Juan and Casanova 8 Poetry and Prose 86
Laughter and Tears IO Action and Passion 88
The Child and the Adolescent 12 The Sun and the Moon 90
Endogamy and Exogamy 14 Gray and Colors 92
Health and Sickness 16 The Soul and the Body 94
The Bull and the Horse 18 Quantity and Quality 96
The Cat and the Dog 20 Left and Right 98
HuntingandFishing 22 Time and Space roo
The Bath and the Shower 24 Surface and Depth 102
The Propeller and the Fin 2 7 Act and Potency rn4
The Willow and the Alder 29 Genera and Differences 106
Animal and Vegetable 31 The Given and the Constructed 109
The Railroad and the Highway 3 3 Idealism and Realism r 11
Pierrot and Harlequin 3 5 A Priori and A Posteriori I I 3
Nomad and Sedentary 3 7 The Absolute and the Relative r 15
Master and Servant 39 The Spring and the Bush 117
August and the White Clown 41 The Devil and God 120
The Tree and the Path 43 Being and Nothingness 122
Salt and Sugar 45 Notes 125
The Fork and the Spoon 47 Index of Names 129
The Cellar and the Attic 49
Water ana. Fire 51
History and Geography 5 3 1
Vertebrates and Crustaceans 56
Environment and Heredity 5 8
Pleasure and Joy 60
Apollo and Dionysus 62
Fear and Anxiety 64
Ferrara, Italy, fi.feeenth century: Tarocchi card depicting
Prudence holding a mirror, accompanied by the dragon­
serpent of wisdom. Photograph © The British Museum.
Translator's Preface
Dualism a la Tournier
Jonathan F. Krell

Empty eyeballs knew

That knowledge increases unreality, that
Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.
W. B. YE.ATS, 11 THE. STATUE.S 11

There is nothing more original, nothing more self

than to feed on others. But you have to digest them.
PAUL VALERY, Tel quel

This collection of fifty-eight 1 short essays analyzes what Tournier

considers the "key concepts" of thought, crucial ideas that have
haunted the author's own writing and that of other thinkers past and
present. His brief introduction summarizes how his illustrious prede­
cessors-most notably Aristotle, Leibniz, and Kant-perceived these
"categories." Aristotle, for example, enumerated ten: substance, qual­
ity, quantity, relation, action, passion, place, time, position, and.way
of being. Tournier insists on the manner in which opposites, or mirror
images, elucidate these fundamental concepts or phenomena, from
the very concrete (man/woman, cat/dog, salt/sugar, water/fire, and
so on) to the exceedingly abstract (fear/anxiety, act/potency, abso­
lute/relative, being/nothingness, and so on). "Culture betrays its
power to undermine only in the presence of civilization. The bull's
neck is brought into perspective by the horse's rump. Thanks to the
fork, the spoon manifests its maternal tenderness. It is only in the
light ofthe sun that the moon speaks of herself."
Although the subjects are serious, Tournier's discussions are never
ponderous. Amateur philosophers will firid the book an engaging
entree into complex philosophical questions, rendered at least tempo­
rarily lucid by this literary philosopher known for his clear, readable
style. Humor is always a part of Tournier's art. For example, he cites
Ma.rx-Groucho and Karl-in the first essay, "Man and Woman." And
who is Angelus Choiselus, whose haunting words close the essay
 "History and Geography"? A mystic like the seventeenth-century
German poet and theologian Angelus Silesius? No, the "Angel of
Choisel" ( whom Tournier also quotes in other essays and in his novel
Eleazar2 ) is named after the most famous resident of this tiny village
in the valley of the Chevreuse: Tournier himself. Two other person­
ages cited are also inventions of the author: Ibn Al Houdai:da ["Deri­
sion and Celebration") and EdwardReinrot ("Quantity and Quality'').
viii Houdaj:da, explained Tournier in a conversation with the translator,
means "to tum" in Arabic (tourner, in French); as for Reinrot ("pure
red," in German), it is Tournier spelled backwards, minus the u.
Tournier pokes fun at contemporary politicians in IIAugust and the
White Clown." He detects traces of the sly white clown in former
presidents Franc_;:ois Mitterrand and Valery Giscard d'Estaing, as well
as in former prime minister Edouard Balladur, but classifies Charles
De Gaulle, Georges Marchais, Raymond Barre, and Jacques Chirac as
so many IIAugusts i1'?1sattered and beleaguered red clowns.
Provocation is also a standard weapon in Tournier's arsenal-and
in turn can serve as fuel for his critics. In "The Bull and the Horse,"
he declares 'that Pasiphae-i:he wife of Minos who was famous for
her love affair with the white bull that engendered the Minotaur­
"sleeps in every woman." How are we to interpret this statement? Is
it simply a boorish reference to the infidelity of women, or perhaps
an allusion to the medieval phrase tota mulier in utero (see "Man and
Woman"), wherein the essence of woman was considered to be her
sexuality? Or is Pasiphae, more positively, a celebration of the libera­
tion of women from patriarchal dominance-as Lilith has come to
symbolize in feminist criticism?
Readers might recall the uproar caused by Tournier's statements
against abortion in an interview in Newsweek in which he declared
that "[a]bortionists are the sons and grandsons of the monsters of
Auschwitz."3 In "Man and Woman," he again broaches this subject,
stating that in some countries (such as India), women will more often
abort female rather than male fetuses. This choice has led to "the
increasing scarcity of the feminine sex brought on by women them­
selves" (my emphasis), words that will surely lead to more con­
troversy.
Ever since the publication in 1967 of his first novel, Vendredi ou
Jes limbes du Pacifi.que (Friday), a remarkable rendition of the Robin-
son Crusoe story, readers have inevitably experienced de;ii-lu with
Michel Tournier, who is happy to admit his great debt to other writ­
ers. "My books," he writes in his intellectual autobiography Le Vent
Paiaclet (The Wind Spirit), must be recognized-reread-at the first
reading."4 Friday was followed in 1970 by Le Roi des Aulnes (trans­
lated in the United States as The Ogre and in Britain as The Erl-King),
inspired by Goethe's famous ballad, "The Erl-King," and by Gunter
Grass's The Tin Drum. Les Meteores (1975; Gemini) owes a great ix
deal to Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days and to the
writings of the twelfth-century Italian mystic Joachim di Fiore. Gas-
pard, Melchior et Balthazar (1980; The Four Wise Men) and Gilles eiJ
Jeanne (1983) were both inspired by "the blanks left by sacred and
historical texts," Tournier tells us in the publisher's insert for Gilles
eiJ Jeanne. The first is based on several books of the Bible (especially
Matthew), the second on the official documents 0£° the murder trial of
Gilles de Rais, Joan of Arc's comrade in arms during the Hundred
Years War. Tournier's entire oeuvre-novels, short stories, and essays
-is an intertextual mirror, culminating here in The Mirror of Ideas.
As he does in his other works, in The Mirror of Ideas Tournier
gives a privileged place to the words of others. Each essay closes with
a quotation that illustrates the concepts discussed. His own ideas are
thus enveloped in the thoughts of others: the philosophers who in­
spired the treatise in the first place and the closing statements of the
many people who have inspired him.
If the words and works of others constitute a first kind of intertext,
the writings of Tournier himself represent another. For example, in
the essay "Pierrot and Harlequin," after evoking Moliere, Pagnol, and
Giono, Tournier refers to one of his own stories as if it were the
product of another: "Michel Tournier, with Pierrot or the Secrets of
the Night, reduced this story to its fundamental philosophical quali­
ties/' At another point, in "The Cellar and the Attic," Tournier re­
writes, almost word for word, "The Spirit of the Stairway," a short
text of Des clefs et des serrures (Keys and locks, 1979), itself re­
published in Petites Proses (1986).
Mirrors proliferate in Tournier's prose, which, as has been said of
postmodernist literature in general, is self-reflexive and essentially
narcissistic. The Tournier character is often a disappointed Narcis­
sus, repulsed by rather than attracted to his image, which only serves
 to remind him of the ugliness and loneliness of the human condition.
Three examples illustrate this inversion of the Narcissus myth. First,
in Friday, after years of isolation, Robinson Crusoe begins to doubt
his own identity: his body seems to be" a thing that is me ... but is it
really me1"5 When he finally dares to look into a mirror recovered
from the shipwreck, he sees "the shadowy disgrace of a mask" (89), a
dull, frozen face that has lost the ability to smile. He is"a new kind of
x Narcissus, in the depths of sadness, full of self-loathing'' (91 ), conclud­
ing that since one's face is but a palimpsest of one's relations with
others, and, since he has for so long lacked companionship, his own
face has "died" (90). Similarly, Abel Tiffauges, protagonist.of The Ogre
and a loner like Crusoe, begins each day with "the disappointment of
the mirror."6 Disgusted by the yellowish face, greenish teeth, and
"uninspired" forehead he sees, he invents a cleansing ritual: kneeling
in front of the toilet, he plunges his head in and flushes. A grotesque
parody of Narcissus admiring his reflection in the pool, the ceremony
of the"shithouse sham1&iii (73) represents the myth debased and cor­
rupted by its contact with what one might call a coarse-section of hu­
manity. Finally, Jean, one of the twin brother protagonists of Gemini,
experiences the mirror's malevolence in a clothing boutique. Already
unsure of his place in the world because of the suffocating self­
sufficient existence the twins have led since birth, the teenaged Jean­
though well beyond the mirror phase-is fragmented and shattered by
the sight of his image multiplied by a triple mirror: "[I]t's gleaming
jaws closed on me and crushed me so cruelly that I shall forever bear
its marks. 117 Jean faints when he looks into the mirror, for it is his
brother Paul he imagines he sees, not himself, whom the mirror
seems to have swallowed up: "I was nowhere, I no longer existed"
(285). These three passages demonstrate the sinister workings of the
mirror in Tournier's fiction. It can reveal the two faces of solitude: on
the one hand, the desperate loneliness of Crusoe and Tiffauges; on the
other, the suffocating relationship with his twin that annihilates
Jean's very identity.
The duality inherent in the mirror suggests, however, that there is
a p_ositive side to the symbolism associated with this simple object. If
the mirror inspires the dark terror of the "double," if it is the source of
illusion and delusion, it also symbolizes the truth-sometimes diffi­
cult to face-that lies in the soul and the heart, as Mallarme's Hero­
dias discovers:
 "Omirror!
... I appeared in you like a faraway shadow,
But, horror! Some evenings, in your severe pool,
-I have discovered the nakedness of my scattered dream! 8

Like Mallarme's poetry, The Mirror of Ideas is an intellectual search

for clarity and truth based on the love of wisdom, a metaphysical
inquiry that goes to the etymological root of the word "mirror":
xi
Speculum (mirror) gave the noun speculation: originally, to
speculate was to observe the sky and the relative movement of
the stars with the help of a mirror. Sidus (star) also gave consider­
ation, which etymologically means to look at the stars. These
two abstract words, today designating highly intellectual pro­
cesses, are rooted in the study of stars reflected in mirrors. The
mirror, then, as a reflective surface, is the foundation of an ex­
tremely rich symbolism connected with knowledge.9

The "highly intellectual" nature of this book is most evident in the

abstract essays, most of which fall toward the end. Michel Toumier's
first love was philosophy: he admits in The Wind Spirit to writing
novels that are only realistic or naturalistic in appearance, novels
"secretly driven by the forces of ontology and material logic" I 17 9 ). In
The Mirror of Ideas, Toumier's maitres ii penser come to the fore
and, notwithstanding his professed admiration for Plato's lineage
(the modern rationalists, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and so onl, it is
Bergson and the phenomenologists who informed his study of imme­
diate experience-Husserl, Sartre, and Bachelard-whose ideas domi­
nate here. This book is dedicated to Gaston Bachelard, Tournier's
former professor at the Sorbonne. Bachelard's greate�t achievement,
Toumier tells us in The Wind Spirit, was to have demystified the
sciences and to have shown that "one approaches the absolute by
means of laughter" 1153). Like Bachelard, Tournier is a demystifier,
and many of these essays attempt to give concrete weight to intan­
gible concepts. For the absolute may be closer to our immediate expe­
rience than to the celestial realm of ideas: who is to say, Toumier
notes in his introduction, "that Being and God are lighter than cats
and dogs"?
From the beginning, duality has been a recurrent theme in Tour­
nier's fictions and essays, and The Mirror of Ideas is the culmination
 of his thoughts on this subject, a literary distillation where plot and
character disappear in favor of philosophical musing. Readers famil­
iar with Tournier will immediately recognize the parade of dichoto­
mies: master/servant, surface/depth !from Friday); nomadic/seden­
tary, alder/willow (from The Ogre); purity/innocence, time/space
jfrom Gemini). This book is not only, in the words of Gerard Genette,
an "auto-hypertext;" it is also a "hyper-hypertext" 10 to the nth degree
xii in which a theme borrowed from an original hypotext (like Defoe's
Robinson.Crusoe) is reincarnated not once but several times, each
text engendering another that in turn reflects it. One might be sur­
prised to find such a dogged dualism in an author critics have baptized
as "postmodern," and thus as rejecting the baroque dualistic concept
of oppositions and contradictions rooted in Leibniz's binary scale.
After all, the postmodern age is one of "blurred boundaries," 11 of
disbelief in the grand metanarratives of Western metaphysics12 estab­
lished by some of theyery philosophers whose thoughts and words
permeate The Mirior l}1deas: Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and
so on. Yet it is to Nietzsche-thar most radical critic of metaphysics 13
and the postmodemist's philosopher of preference-that Tournier
seems to be irresistibly drawn. 14 Like Nietzsche, Tournier spurns
politics and nationalism I see "Genera and Differences" I and is a" cul­
tured" rather than a "civilized" man (see "Culture and Civilization"),
believing that no one civilization can proclaim its superiority over
others. Both writers exude a sympathy for the nomadic: Nietzsche,
who proclaims that "[h]e who has attained even a modicum of free­
dom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on earth; "15 Tournier,
who constantly (especially in The Ogre) defends the nomadic left
against the sedentary right in the ancient rivalry between them. Fi­
nally, there is a Dionysian exuberance in the writing of both thinkers,
Zarathustra's dancing god16 becoming Tournier's dancing Friday who
helps Crusoe overcome his puritanical Christianity and embrace in­
stead a transcendental faith in the elements.
Given Tournier's predilection for myths and the resulting fertile
ground that myth critics have found in his work, we might tum to
Dionysus as the key to understanding this postmodernist's obsession
with duality. In Figures mythiques et visages de l'reuvre (Mythic
figures and faces of the work, r979 J, the sociologist and literary critic
Gilbert Durand analyzes in mythical terms the overriding literary
 tendencies of the last two hundred years. He describes the literary
production of early-nineteenth-century France as being dominated
by the mythic figure of Prometheus, who symbolizes a firm belief
in human progress and "the victory of historic man," that "Rebel
against the reign of the bad gods."17 The major representative of this
Promethean art is Victor Hugo, in whose work Durand detects a
plethora of antitheses, poetic expressions in which opposites are al-
ways contradictory and rarely combinatory. Baudelaire, however, xiii
tended more_ towards the use of oxymorons, figures in which con-
trasting elements are blended rather than opposed. Baudelaire calls
himself the "perfect chemist" (Durand 272), and in his Fleurs du
malj1857; The Flowers of Evil) he upholds his promise to extract
gold from £1th, beauty from evil. His desire to voyage to heaven or
hell-indiscriminately-prefigures the title of one of Nietzsche's last
works, Beyond Good and Evil ( 1886).
. Baudelaire's oxymorons typify the "blurred boundaries" that crit­
ics have noted in recent works of the postmodern age, as well as in
the Dionysian era of late-nineteenth-century literature exemplified
by Zola. For Durand, Zola represents the end of Platonic dualism and
the heroic Promethean myth. The world is no longer black and
· white, but gray. The Zolian protagonist lives in a Dionysian blur
marked by sexual ambiguity and the excesses of violent crime, alco­
holism, incest, adultery, and insanity. Durand associates the Diony­
sian with ugliness and decadence. As Zola condemns France's Sec­
ond Empire (1852-1870), writes Durand, he destroys the illusions of
"the great titanic myths of Romanticism: Prometheus or Jesus,"
myths that were "bastardized in a 'decadence' confirmed by the mo­
nopoly of a myth: that of Dionysus" (264-65). These words echo
Zola's contemporary, Nietzsche, who characterizes the early Greeks
as a civilization "craving for ugliness, ... for the tragic myth, for the
image of everything terrible, evil, cryptic, destructive and deadly un­
derlying existence." Thus tragedy-like naturalism-was born from
"the Dionysiac madness, ... the symptom of degeneracy, decline, of
the final stages of culture.11 18
Tournier's world is similarly blurred or gray. He tells us in the essay
"Gray and Colors" that "reality is gray," and many of his characters­
complex men leading marginal lives, fictional representations of
Freud's "polymorphous pervert" (Le Vent Paraclet 122)-would seem
 to confirm that statement. If Zola helped destroy the Romantic myth
of the Promethean hero, Tournier is contributing to a similar destruc­
tion of binary opposites. In Le Crepuscule des masques [Twilight of
the masks, 1992), for example, he declares the end of masculine and
feminine stereotypes: the beginning of the new millennium will be
heralded by the virile femininity of a "New Eve," the woman body­
builder.19 And although the mythic figures associated with her may
xiv more appropriately be the powerful Artemis and Athena rather than
the soft Dionysus, what is important is that she is a synthesis of
qualities that refuses the traditional dichotomy between the strong
male and the weak female. In The Mirror of Ideas, Tournier makes
clear the synthetic-rather than.antithetic-natu.re of his "opposites,"
a term he is careful to enclose in quotation marks in the opening
paragraph of his introduction. He then goes on to say that his terms
"are not in contradictory opposition," which is true for many of his
essays: pleasure does 11ot contradict joy, nor does the sun contradict
,;.:,;r-··
the moon, poetry prose-; and so on. And what Tournier finds interest-
ing in "Water and Fire" is not so much their opposition as their fusion:
in the alcohol-"firewater"-that consumed the life of so many writ­
ers. This, then, is dualism a la Tournier. Tournier may be the last
dualist in the way that Nietzsche was the last metaphysician-and
the last thinker-for Martin Heidegger. 20 As Nietzsche contributed to
the decentering of philosophy {Derrida 410-13), so_Tournier ques­
tions the veracity of the mirror and challenges, as did Zola and Baude­
laire before him, the antithetical nature of oppositions.

I would like to thank David Krell for his precious advice, and the
Humanities Center and the Research Foundation of the University of
Georgia for the generous grants that allowed me to complete this
translation.
THE MIRROR OF IDEAS
IN MEMORY OF GASTON BACHELARD
 Northern Italy, fifteenth century: Engraving entitled
"Allegory of Fortune," with Fortuna, balanced on a winged sphere,
gazing into a mirror. Photograph © The British Museum.
Introduction

Two fundamental ideas have inspired this little treatise. The first
maintains that thought functions with the help of a finite number of
key concepts that can be enumerated and clarified. The second as­
serts that these concepts go in pairs, each possessing an "opposite"
neither more nor less positive than itself.
The key concepts of thought are well known to philosophers, who
call them categories, and sometimes attempt to inventory them. Aris­
totle distinguished ten; substance, quality, quantity, relation, action,
passion, place, time, position, and way of being. Leibniz counted six:
substance, quantity, quality, relation, action, and passion. Kant al­
lows for twelve, four fundamental categories, each subdivided into
three subordinate principles:

{
unity
1. quantity plurality
totality

{
reality
2. quality negation
limitation
substance-accident
3. relation
{ cause-effect
reciprocity
possibility
4. modality . { existence
necessity

Finally, Octave Hamelin, in his Essay on the Principal Elements of

Representationj1907), established the successive genesis of eleven
categories according to the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model:

Thesis:Relation
Antithesis:Number
 Synthesis: Time
Antithesis:Space
Synthesis:Movement
Antithesis:Quality
Synthesis:Alteration
Antithesis:Specification
Synthesis:Causality
2 Antithesis :Finality
Synthesis:Personality

It goes without saying that the fewer the categories, the more ab­
stract they are and the more difficult the constructive effort of the
philosopher. The r 16 key concepts presented in this essay constitute
on the contrary a very modest work of abstraction governed by the
desire to achieve the greatest possible concrete richness. The reader
might be surprised to see among the concepts cat and dog, alder and
willow, horse and b\ltl; and so forth. But these are concepts charged
with considerable emblematic and symbolic meaning beyond the
concrete phenomena to which they refer.
As in other tables of categories, these concepts are arranged in pairs
of opposites. But it must be understood that they are not in contradic­
tory opposition.
For example, the opposite of God is the Devil, a perfectly concrete
being, rather than atheism's absence of God. In the same way, Being
is contrasted with the Nothingness manifested by lived experiences
rather than with nonbeing. Friendship is confronted with love and
not indifference, and so forth.
This binary method has proved extraordinarily fertile and in fact
gave birth to the entire book. One might suggest that an isolated
concept offers a smooth impenetrable surface to the mind. Analyzed
in the light of its opposite, however, the idea explodes or becomes
transparent, revealing its intimate structure. Culture betrays its
power to undermine only in the presence of civilization. The bull's
neck is brought into perspective by the horse's rump. Thanks to the
fork, the spoon manifests its maternal tenderness. It is only in the
light of the sun that the moon speaks of herself, and so forth.
Should I have analyzed these 116 ideas in a dialectical manner, like
Octave Hamelin, or alternatively left them unorganized, like matter
that, despite its disparate nature, is still accessible to thought? The
order of their presentation was itself a significant choice. I decided to
start with the particular and proceed to the universal, beginning with
the cat and the horse and ending up with God and Being. I remember
seeing a display of ancient weapons exhibited against a castle wall.
The heaviest had been quite naturally placed at the bottom and the
lightest at the top, so that one ascended from the club to the axe, from
the sword to the bow crowned with feathered arrows. But I am not so 3
sure that Being and God are lighter than cats and dogs ....
It is true that, if one considers the right and left columns, one can
detect a vague affinity among the elements of each. Are the dog, the
attic, the sedentary, the right, and God kinfolk? How about the cat,
the cellar, the nomad, the left, and the Devil? But that is a game best
left to the freedom of the reader.
Man eiJ Woman

If we are to believe the Bible, God created man on the sixth day. He
made him at once male and female, androgynous, possessing every­
thing he needed to reproduce himself. The earth was but a desert
then, and man was shaped from the dust of the ground.
Later, God created paradise, and man was charged with cultivating
and protecting it. By and by God realized that man's solitude was
not good. He had all the animals-mammals and birds-parade be­
fore man, who was to name them and choose a companion for him­
self. He named cl],�, but found no companion among the animals.
So God cast man into a deep sleep and removed all his female organs.
Around these organs he created a new man whom he called woman.
Eve was born.
All the psychology of the two sexes descends from these origins.
One remembers .6rst of all that the androgyne accepts with difficulty
his solitary love affair. This is why the sea urchin, obviously made to
reproduce alone, und(!rtakes a quite impractical gymnastic feat in
a
order to niate with partner.
The ablation of his female "parts" has left man with a badly healed
psychological wound. For many men the nostalgia for motherhood
has not been healed by the meager joys of fatherhood.
We must remember that woman originates in paradise. While man
was formed in the dust of the desert, woman was born amidst the
flowers and succulents of paradise that determined many of her per­
sonality traits. Moreover, she was molded around her own sexuality.
She is more substantially submissive to femininity than man is to
virility. This is what the scholastics expressed by the formula tota
muliez in utezo I the whole woman is in her uterus).
Man has reaped considerable benefits from the advantages that
nature has given him over woman, reducing her to slavery. Karl Marx
expressed this by saying that woman is the proletariat of man. But
over the centuries, woman has made gains in physical force and eco-
nomic independence. The burden of maternity gets lighter year by
year. One might foresee the coming of a purely matriarchal society in
which' men would be reduced to playthings made solely for women's
pleasure.
The coming of this feminist society will perhaps be hastened by
the increasing scarcity of the feminine sex brought on by women
themselves. More and more pregnant women can have an abortion in
full knowledge of the sex of the baby they are carrying. And they 5
almost always choose abortion if the child is a girl. Already in India,
the scales of the current new generation are heavily tipped in favor of
boys. This will result in a shortage of women, and a high value will be
placed on the escapees of the abortive genocide. The second conse-
quence will be the extinction of the human race, because women, not
men, ensure its perpetuation.

Men are ;ust like any other women.1

GROUCHO MARX
Love ei) Friendship

A comparison between love and friendship seems at first to favor

love. Next to the passion of love, the bond of friendship seems frivo­
lous, bland, and superficial. And love has been celebrated for millen­
nia in theater, poetry, and fiction. By comparison, how could friend­
ship not cut a sorry figure?
But upon closer inspection, love's advantages over friendship are in
fact quite debatable. One of the great differences between the two
is that friendship cannot exist without reciprocity. You cannot be
friends with someone who is not friends with you. For friendship to
be, it must be s$ied, while love, on the contrary, seems to thrive
when unrequited. Unhappy love is the principal motivating force of
tragedy and the novel. "I love and am loved," said the poet. "If it were
only the same person, happiness would be mine." Alas, it is rarely the
same person!
There is a still more serious difference between love and friend­
ship: the latter cannot endure without respect. If your friend com­
mits an act you consider vile, he ceases to be your friend. Contempt
kills friendship. But love's fury can be indifferent to the stupidity,
cowardice, or meanness of the loved one. Indifferent? At times it is
even nourished by this abjection, as if greedily hungry for the worst
faults of the lover. For love can also be coprophagous.
In truth, our Western civilization wagers considerably too much
on love. How could one dare build an entire life on this ephemeral
fever? La Bruyere noted long ago that "the time that strengthens
friendship weakens love." Yes, time works against love. In the past,
marriages were made on the basis of social, religious, and material
suitability. These primary conditions satisfied, all the spouses had to
do was love one another. Today everything hinges on "love at first
sight." Afterwards there is always time to divorce. Even faithfulness
is subordinated to this fleeting vertigo. Brigitte Bardot said, "I have
always been faithful to a man as long as I was in love with him." And
then? Jules Romains wrote that all love can do is "perfume the place
where friendship will settle."

A good marriage, if such a thing exists,

refuses the company and conditions of love. It strives
to represent those of friendship.
MONTAIGNE, Essays
Don fuan eiJ Casanova

They are the great seducers in our Western imagery. Yet Don Juan
hails from classical Spain and Casanova from romantic Venice, two
completely opposite worlds. When Tirso de Molina wrote his unpre­
tentious comedy The Seducer of Seville in I 6 30, he was unaware that
he had just invented one of the great modern myths. Don Juan would
escape from him and settle in other comedies, operas, and novels. It
is characteristic of mythical characters to overflow in this way the
cradle of their birth and acquire dimensions and meanings their au­
thor never dreamecl.,,pf�_as did Don Juan, and later, Robinson Crusoe
and Werther.
For Don Juan, sex is an anarchic power that challenges order in all
forms: social, moral, and especially religious. The comedies he ap­
pears in all resemble a hunt in which he plays the role of the stag
pursued by a pack of women, fathers of noble blood, betrayed hus­
bands, and creditors. The hunt ends in a cemetery with the sound of
the horn and the kill of the great wild male.
This catastrophic trajectory is possible, however, only because of
the complicity of Don Juan himself. When he gives money to a beggar
on the condition that he blaspheme God, Don Juan, like a revolution­
ary trampling on a consecrated host, proves his religious faith. Such
ideas would not occur to authentic unbelievers. And when, at the
end, he makes the symbolic gesture of putting his hand in the hand of
the Commander's statue, Don Juan is consenting to be dragged down
to hell.
Yet it is through his vision of woman that Don Juan reveals himself
fully. It has been said that he did not like women, that he disdained
them. He treats them like prey, and the list of his conquests read by
the valet Leporello is no more than a list of kills. Such is the eternity
of Don Juan that he lives on among the young toughs of the suburbs
whose favorite sport is "scoring with chicks." Butfor Don Juan, sex is
inseparable from religion. Woman is the great temptress, and the
man who succumbs to her evil charms is damned.
Whereas Don Juan is a rich aristocrat, Casanova, a poor commoner,
relies on his personal charm to seduce. Even though he is not hand­
some, women cannot resist him because they know from the begin­
ning that he loves them with all his body and all his heart. The adore
di femmina in Mozart's opera would disgust Tirso de Molina's hero;
he would readily confuse it with the stench of hell's sulphur. Casa- 9
nova breathes in this smell deeply, for it seems the aroma of life
itself. Wandering adventurer, gambler, cheater, incorrigibly unfaith-
ful, he is nevertheless loved because he loves the whole woman,
including her most intimate secrets.
The most prestigious episode in the life of Casanova cannot be
found in his Memoizs, and perhaps it never happened. We know that
in Prague in r 7 86 Mozart met his librettist, the Venetian Lorenzo Da
Ponte, to begin work on the opera they would produce the following
year. Some notes found among Casanova's papers lead us to believe
that he joined them to lend his advice. No doubt it was he who gave
Mozart's opera its aura of joy (the opera is a dramma giocoso), and
that the famous adore di femmina was his creation.

Steel appears to be the substance of which Mozart's polyphony is con­

structed; something extremely hard and -flexible in a perfect softness.
Thus Don fuan, at the end of Act I, bends his sword before his chest, in
defiance of the choir of lamentations, remorse, and rage.
PIERRE JEAN JOUVE, Le Don Tuan de Mozart
Laughter eiJ Tears

Laughter and tears belong to man and thus have no equivalent in the
animal world. They are two involuntary convulsions that concern
principally the face.
The old edition of the Larousse Medical Dictionary is silent on the
subject of tears. On the other hand, its description of laughter de­
serves to be quoted:

There are several degrees of laughter. The first degree is charac­

terized by a sudden dilation of the mbicularis oris and a contrac­
tion of the ri�fii., the caninus and the buccinator, at the same
time that the exhalation is interrupted but remains silent.
During the second degree, the muscular contractions spread
through all parts affected by the facial nerves all the way to the
muscles of the neck, in particular the platysma.
Finally in the_ third degree, laughter shakes the entire organ­
ism; tears fl.ow; women urinate; the diaphragm contracts spas­
modically, compressing the intestinal mass with such force as to
sometimes produce pain.

Laughter and tears have contrasting meanings. The laughing man

expresses his superiority, the crying man his inferiority, in relation to
the person or situation provoking their reaction. But it will be noted
that neither acts: both are witnesses. The man of action has time to
neither laugh nor cry. This is why the theater is the privileged place
of laughter and tears. These witnesses of a particular kind, these
spectators, are made to laugh by comedy, to cry by tragedy.
There are several theories of laughter. The most complete is pro­
posed by Hemi Bergson in Laughter (1900). Society, because of the
perfection of its organization, is threatened with sclerosis. The ges­
tures we are taught and forced to make can become mechanical. Our
society is in danger of becoming like an anthill or a beehive. We must
be careful to preserve life's spontaneity as well as the flexibility to
 adapt to new situations. That is what laughter is for. Through laugh­
ter, each member of society is invited to punish any other member he
catches in the act of mechanical behavior. For example, a robot mov­
ing along a sidewalk might quite naturally run into a lamppost.
There would be nothing funny about this. But a man who bumps into
a lamppost because he is reading his newspaper makes us laugh: he
acted like a robot, and he deserves to be ridiculed by the witnesses.
Comedy arises when the mechanical is laid over the living. II
Tears constitute an extreme simplification of an individual's be­
havior when faced with a situation he feels incapable of handling.
Lacking the skills to deal with the situation, he breaks down com­
pletely. Whoever does not know what to do or say against the aggres­
sion of the outside world still has the last resort of bursting into tears_
Perhaps a new and adapted response will be born from this liquefac­
tion of his being. A man in tears is "taken apart," like a machine
. whose parts have all been removed and disassembled.

A virgin's laugh is an exquisite wound.

LANZA DEL VAS To, Le Cbiffre des choses
The Child eiJ the Adolescent

The accepted ideas concerning children were most unfavorable dur­

ing the ancien regime. For our ancestors of the classical seventeenth
century, the child is without a doubt a dirty, vicious, ignorant, lying
little brute. Bossuet: "Childhood is, other than death, the vilest and
most despicable state of human nature." To make a good Christian
and a worthy subject of the king out of him, one must shut the child
up in a boarding school where priests speaking nothing but Latin will
submit him to a regimen resembling what will later be called brain­
washing. He will emerge 11educated," "chastised," ready to perform
in society.
The rise of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century and the work
of its philosophes Diderot and Rousseau changed all this. For the
classical philosophers, society alone is good, and it strives to mold
the child's nature, which is bad from the beginning. For Rousseau, on
the contrary, nature is basically good but is perverted by society. This
is the starting point of his major work, Emile { 1762 ).
There he develops the idea that the child is not a potential adult, a
promise for the future, a "budding rose," but a being already perfect,
in full bloom-in fact, an adult. 11 We have often heard people talk
about a mature man, but let us consider a mature child: this sight
will be newer for us and will not be less agreeable."
Rousseau's "adult" child is twelve years old and presents a state of
ideal happiness and equilibrium. A state threatened, alas, by a sort of
decrepitude called puberty. And Rousseau, who fears this catastro­
phe, evokes an idyllic countryside "in the Valais and in certain hilly
qmtons of Italy, like Friuli, where one can see big boys as strong as
men but still with an unchanged voice and a beardless chin, and big
girls, well formed, without a single periodic sign of their sex."
For adolescence is first and foremost the brutal irruption of sex­
uality into the innocence of childhood, a sexuality necessarily unfor­
tunate since society gives it no possible form of satisfaction.
 Adolescence means contesting the established order and revolting
against the society of adults. A poll was taken on the political options
of young people. For the most part, children are conservative. They
believe that there is good in society. In the French Revolution, they
focus on the Terror, which they condemn. Adolescents, on the other
hand, are on the political left and consider the Revolution a work of
justice and liberation.
The adolescent condition is not without danger. It is threatened by 13
drugs, suicide, delinquency, and bike accidents. People die at all ages.
But statistics show that at eleven years old we die the least often. The
weaknesses of infancy have been overcome and the dangers of adoles-
cence have not yet been encountered. At sixteen years of age, the
mortality rate suddenly increases.
Children's literature can at times be extremely dark fPerrault,
Segur, Herge, the comic books). It does not, however, criticize so­
ciety, which it considers a part of nature, inevitable like the forest or
the sea. And as for the authors read by adolescents [Rimbaud, Con­
rad, Boris Vian), they inspire revolution less than escape or a journey
of initiatiop.

Reveille sang its call among the barracks' paths,

And moving air distUibed the tall, commanding lamps.
It was the time when dreams of lust and swarming heat
Set brown young adolescents twisting in their sheets .
. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, "DAWN"1
Endogamy eiJ Exogamy

What is a harmonious couple? Should the man and the woman re­
semble one another or on the contrary complement each other with
opposite traits? Logic would favor complementarity. For the extrava­
gant woman, a thrifty man. For the rich husband, a bride without a
dowry. One dreams of kings marrying shepherdesses and dwarfs gi­
ants so that things return to a sort of equilibrium.
Thus the formation of couples obeys two opposing principles, ex­
ogamy and endogamy. Exogamy requires that the young man look for
his bride far from his own family. It forbids incest, that is, marrying
�'-'--���
the mother, the sis�r, the daughter, even the first cousin. Claude
Levi-Strauss described in Essay on the Elementary Structures of Kin­
ship (1949) how, in many primitive societies, marriages were neces­
sari_ly exchanges between two groups-tribes or families-and were
forbidden within the same group. Now that classes are co-ed in
schools, we are witnessing an amusing resurgence of the exogamic
principle: in most cases, romances involve students from different
grades rather than those· from the same grade.
·But when one examines closely the some 200,000 marriages cele­
brated annually in France, it is clear that the endogamic principle is
still largely dominant. Certainly one must not marry "too close"
!sister or cousin). Yet it is even more important not to marry "too
far." One must not go seek a black or yellow woman if one is white, a
rich woman if one is poor, a Protestant woman if one is Catholic.
People often stay within the limits of their profession: the doctor
marries the nurse, the pharmacist the_ laboratory worker, the cook
the waitress, the professor the schoolteacher. Thus one sees lines of
descent that stay traditionally in the bank, the post office or tele­
phone company, the entertainment or steel industries. Likewise geo­
graphic stability remains the rule in spite of the migrations that,
while attracting attention, concern only a tiny minority. In France,
Paris constitutes an exception, functioning as a pump, sucking in
provincials looking for a career and then pumping them out to finish
their lives back in their hometowns. On the other hand, Lyon, Bor­
deaux, Lille, and so forth possess an untouchable core population.
The epitome of endogamy is provided by biology: identical twins.
They form original, often indissoluble couples, incompatible with
the formation of other couples. One sometimes sees twin brothers
marry twin sisters, but the proportion of unmarried identical twins is
much higher than that of nontwins. 1s

Asinus asinum fricat.

Donkey rubs up against donkey.
LATIN PROVERB
Health eiJ Sickness

One can be an excellent doctor without having clear ideas on health

and-sickness. That is the most usual case. Some people think they
have said enough when they have defined health by the absence of
suffering or as life in the silence of the organs. Now, there are acute
· pains-toothaches, intercostal pains-that are nevertheless insignifi­
cant, and conversely, fatal and incurable disorders that progress with
no apparent symptoms. Suffering cannot be considered a sure and
precise symptom, still less a criterion for illness.
There are two):ypes of sicknesses, one quantitative, the other qual­
itative. Quantitf�·e sickness boils down to a lack jhypo) or an excess
(hyper). Thus blood pressure can be excessive or dangerously insuffi­
cient. From this point of view, health can be defined as a harmonious
equilibrium of all the functions.
Qualitative illness can be explained by the presence of a patho­
genic factor that has infiltrated the organism. This type of illness is
particularly understandable when the pathogenic factor is a living
being-bacteria, virus, fungus, and so forth-that lives as a parasite in
the sick person's body. Louis Pasteur won fame by studying these
illnesses and their prevention by vaccination. This conception of
sickness is easily understood by the public because it aligns exactly
with archaic ideas about the demonic possession of certain sick peo­
ple and the exorcism that could free them.
From these two conceptions of sickness result ii contrario two
definitions of health, one by the absence of excess or lack, the other
by the absence of pathogenic factors. These two conceptions have in
common a negative nature and amount to defining health as the
absence of illness.
Georges Canguilhem can take credit for having given health afully
positive definition in his Studies in the History and Philosophy of
Science lr968). At each moment of its life, the organism is in balance
with its environment. It is adapted to temperature, air pressure, hu-
midity, and so forth. In the same way it possesses sufficient energy
resources to make its organs and muscles work. However, these en­
vironmental conditions change constantly. The hours and the sea­
sons force the living organism constantly to readapt. To survive en­
vironmental changes, the organism must possess reserves and be to a
degree over-adapted to its current surronndings. Health, according to
Canguilhem, is nothing more than this overabnndance of resources
that permits the organism to respond to the infidelities of its en- 17
vironment. Good health, he says, is the ability to abuse one's health
with impunity. Sickness and death occur when there is no longer a
margin of protection against the changing or increasing demands of
the environment.

The work of art is a balance outside of time,

an artificial health.
ANDRE GIDE, Journals
The Bull etJ the Horse

The bull is the god of virility. Pasiphae, wife of Minos, king of Crete,
conceived an irrepressible love for a white bull. Dedalus, the inge­
nious craftsman, made her a hollow brass cow she could slip into so
that she could be be mounted by her monstrous lover without being
crushed. From this love was born the Minotaur: half-man, half-bull.
A Pasiphae sleeps in every woman.
After the genital organs, it is the shoulders that one notices in the
bull. All his strength is in the shoulders. They are the source of the
blow wielded by the.. horns and the work done under the yoke. His
·i'P'.
rump, on the other hand, is scrawny and lacks initiative. When the
bull pivots, it is his forelegs that move, turning around his hind legs.
The female of the bull holds an even greater place in human my­
thology. She is the animal-mother par excellence, the wetnurse of
nature. Cow = mother+nature. That is why, even if the death of the
bull at the end of a bullfight is celebrated as a ritual sacrifice, the
slaughter of a cow in a meatpacking plant is committed as a shame­
ful crime ·against nature. The bullock alone-because he is neither
virile, like the bull, nor maternal, like the cow-is in his place at the
slaughterhouse.
The entire horse is contained in the rump. Because of his enormous
buttocks and his long mane he is the god of femininity. For the horse,
everything has its source in the rump: his kick as well as his speed and
pulling strength. And the dung as well, because the horse is the only
mammal that has succeeded in ennobling defecation. It is also the
only animal with buttocks, and that brings it closer than any other
animal to humans. When the horse pivots, it turns around its rump,
moving its forelegs. Its swiftness is proverbial, and flight its nor­
mal weapon. In the Portuguese bullfight-in which the bullfighter is
on horseback-it is marvelous to watch the horse dodge the bull's
charges in the small space of the arena.
The donkey and the ox are the horse and bull of the poor. The
donkey symbolizes humility, silent wisdom, and blind devotion. But
it triumphs when it is offered a mare to cover. The cross between a
mare and a donkey is a mule, an animal that is known for its sober­
ness and its capacity for work but that cannot reproduce. The cross
between a horse and a female donkey is a hinny. This operation is not
recommended, for if it is child's play for a mare to give birth to the
young of a donkey, for the she-ass it is a perilous feat to bring into the
world the offspring of a horse. r9
The ox and ass of the manger in Bethlehem are symbols of poverty.
The wealth of the Magi is displayed by their horses, which carry gold,
frankincense, and myrrh. In Jesus's time, the bull was the sacred
animal of the cult of Mithra, which for a long time rivaled Chris­
tianity in the Mediterranean basin.

_"The bull," added Sender to Nancy, "is the only animal

that charges a moving locomotive."
SERGE KOSTER, The Passenger's Condition

"To us, my beauty."

The love that had grown between the commander and his horse had
nothing of these perverted effusions, of this kissing the muzzle, of these
caricatures of love, of all these residues of human feelings that preside
over relationships between old maids and their Pekingese. It was first of-.
all a_ battle, and the mare knew she would give in, she in fact wanted to
give in; a struggle that began in mischievousness, in cunning, and con­
tinued in fury, to finish in a sort of acquiescent swoon, a complete relax­
ation in which both found pleasure.
l'AUL MORAND, Milady
The Cat eiJ the Dog

The cat and the dog are the most domestic of all the animals, that is,
the best integrated into the house (domus). They are integrated, how­
ever, in very different ways.
It has been said that the cat is an indoor tiger, a miniature lion. It is
a fact that his submissiveness to man is much more limited than the
dog's, and so it would be better to describe the cat as tamed rather
than domesticated. What difference is there between a domesticated
and a tamed animal? The former was born in the house. The latter
was born in the wilg and was only later introduced to the house.
Now, it is well known that cats like to have their kittens outside and
then carry them ·one by one into the home.
The cat's independence from man manifests itself in a hundred
ways, notably by its dislike of sugar and the sweet foods dogs love,
but especially by its refusal to learn the gestures that serve man. Jean
Cocteau said he preferred cats to dogs because no one has ever seen a
police cat. But no one has ever seen a sheep cat, a hunting cat, a guide
cat, a circus cat, a sled cat, and so forth, either. It seems to be a point
of honor for the cat to be useless, which doesn't keep him from claim­
ing a better place than the dog in the home. The cat is an ornament, a
luxury.
It is also a solitary creature. It flees its kind, while the dog eagerly
seeks out its own species.
The dog suffers from its excessive devotion to man. He is debased
by his master, who at times forces him to perform humiliating tasks.
And worse, it seems as if breeders employ all the science of genetics
to produce increasingly ugly and monstrous breeds. After dachs­
hunds-which, with their small legs, look like snakes-and bulldogs
-which seem to suffocate when they breathe-they invented Ger­
man shepherds with low hindquarters, greyhounds afflicted with un­
controllable shaking, hairless dogs, and so forth. The function of
these infirmities is obviously to excite and give an object to the pity
and solicitude of the master.
 There are cat people and dog people, and the two rarely coexist.
From the dog, one expects an impulse to open the door and go off to
conquer the outdoors. Man does not walk his dog, he is walked by his
dog. He counts on him to explore in his name all the nooks and
crannies of the street, the country, or the surroundi ng forest. His
sense cif smell-which the cat does not have-is a long-distance de­
tection device that man claims as his own.
By contrast, the cat invites us to stay at home, to curl up in front of 21
the fireplace or under a lamp. Not to doze off but, on the contrary, to
meditate. It is because it is wise-not la zy-that the cat disdains
useless activity. The dog is a "primary" creature, the cat"secondary." 1

A living dog is better than a dead lion.

ECCLESIASTES 9:4
Hunting etJ Fishing

Hunting and fishing-along with gathering�provided the food of pre­

historic humanity. Gathering was replaced by agriculture and hunt­
ing by raising livestock. Only fishing continues to be practiced as a
profession because the oceans cover 70.8 percent of the globe's sur­
face. But the fishing industry is itself in trouble. Fishing quotas have
now been set for trawlers, and the industry seems inevitably headed
toward fish-farming.
Hunting and fishing, however, continue to be practiced as sports,
and the two corresp.9nd to quite opposite psychologies. A person is
rarely both hunter ancl fisherman. In hunting there is an aggressive-
ness that culminates in ostentatious ceremonial. The fox hunt with
its ancestral ritual has its origin in aristocratic, even royal, privileges.
All the kings were hunters-none were ever fishermen. The hunts­
man's fanfare, the baying of the pack, and the hunters' red uniforms
lend an aura of spectacularly violent splendor to the hunt. And the
crack of the gun characterizes the later identification of hunting with
firearms. The hunter is an active "primary." He exhibits a conquering
virility and wants to be king of the forest.
Fishing, on the contrary, is wrapped in mystery and silence. No one
knows what waits or what happens beneath the mirror of the waters.
There are hunting dogs but no fishing dogs, even though certain
breeds adore the water. But neither the Labrador nor the Newfound­
land take advantage of their talent for swimming by fishing. Nature
seems cruel at times. It has given the cat a decided taste for fish and
an insurmountable horror of water. In spite of the name of a Parisian
street made famous by Balzac, 1 a fisher cat has never been seen. As if
to better demarcate the line between hunting and fishing, people do
not hunt sea birds. Since they eat fish, their flesh is inedible.
The hunter is proud of the venison that graces his table, making it
nobler than the commoner's. Deer, hare, pheasant, and wild boar
replace beef, rabbit, chicken, and pork. This huntsman's cooking has
a sour and bitter smell that is exacerbated by the practice of hanging
the meat. On the contrary, freshness remains the absolute impera­
tive of cooking fish.
The fisherman tends toward mystical daydreaming and medita­
tion. His kingdom consists of depth and darkness. He is a contempla­
tive "secondary" person. It will be noted that the Old Testament
shows us Esau, an ardent hunter, unceremoniously supplanted-for a
plate oflentils-by his twin brother Jacob. The Gospels are full of fish 23
and stories about fishing, but they do not mention hunting. The man
of God is called a" fisher of men" because his mission is to gather and
save his fellow men by an evangelizing that resembles the fisherman
casting his net. And the fish was the rallying sign of the first Chris-
tians and the code name of Jesus.

On the other side of the valley, on the edge of the forest, Julian spied a
hart, a doe, and her fawn.
The hart, black and enormous, had sixteen tines and a white beard.
The doe, blond like the dead leaves, was grazing; and the spotted fawn
was nursing without interrupting her mother's walk.
The crossbow hummed once more. The fawn was immediately killed.
Then its mother, looking up at the sky, wailed, her voice deep, heart­
rending, human. Exasperated, fulian felled her with an arrow to the
chest.
The great hart had seen him, and leaped up. fulian shot his last arrow.
It hit the animal in the forehead and stuck there.
The great hart did not seem to feel it; stepping over the corpses, it kept
coming, it was going to pounce on Julian and gore him. fulian shrank
back in unspeakable horror. The prodigious animal stopped and, eyes
burning, as solemn as a patriarch or a ;udge, repeated three times as afar
away bellpealed:
"Cursed! Cursed! Cursed! One day, ferocious heart, you will murder
your father and mother!"
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, The Legend of Saint Julian theHospitaller
The Bath etJ the Shower

In our intimate relationship with water we must choose between the

sacred figures of two gigantic mythological pachyderms, Behemoth
and Ganesha.
It is easy to recognize the hippopotamus in the enthusiastic de­
scription the Book of Job gives us of Behemoth. He lives in the secret
of the swamp, covered by the shadow of willows. He lies among the
lotus and the reeds. He has no fear of the river's floods even when the
waters of the Jordan rise up to his nostrils.
Ganesha, the elephant-god, sprays himself with his trunk to wash
and cool off. He is th�;ctive principle that must be invoked before
any undertaking. Under his feet he holds the rat, the most tireless of
animals. Ganesha is the opposite of Behemoth as action is the op­
posite of dream and showering is the opposite of bathing.
Are you bath or shower? The characterological importance of this
alternative cannot be exaggerated.
You are bath, you tell me? So be it. You've opted for the horizontal
position. Still and dreamy, you float in tepid, scented, sudsy water; it
is murky, even opaque. You close your eyes. But careful! You are de­
fenseless, vulnerable, helpless against any attack. Marat was stabbed
in his bath�ub by Charlotte Corday. In the shower, he surely would
have defended himself!
There's more. You are in a state of regression. You return to the
fetal stage, floating in the amniotic fluid. The bathtub is mother's
belly, a soft, warm, secure home. You put off the agonizing ordeal of
getting out of your bath, a cruel birth that will leave you naked, soft,
and shivering on the hard cold tile of the floor.
In the shower, on the contrary, man stands up. The clear water
invigorates him as he plans his work for the day ahead. He energet­
ically washes with a bar of soap, massaging himself like an athlete
before a game. He is interested in his body. He does not mind at all
that a mirror reflects his image.
The ideal shower is the torrent springing from the purity of the
eternal snows and falling straight down into the rocky valley. Min­
eral water advertisements dig deeply into this vigorous puritan my­
thology. To drink this water is to wash the inside of your body and
administer a sort of internal baptism. For the shower's limpid run­
ning water is shrouded in baptismal symbolism. It was by a shower­
as all the iconography shows-not by a bath that John the Baptist
baptized Jesus in the Jordan. In the shower, the sinner washes away
his faults and brings an original innocence back to his body. Cleanli- 25
ness-with all its moral halo-haunts the person in the shower, while
it is but a vague concern for the bather.
It is of course obvious: politically the shower is on the left, the bath
on the right.

The red sand is liRe an endless sea,

That fl.runes up, mute, sunken in its bed.
A still undulation fills
The horizon with copper vapors where man lives.

No life and no sound. All the lions, their hunger satisfied

Sleep deep in the cave a hundred leagues away,
And the giraffe drinks in the blue springs,
Over there, under the date palms known to the panthers.

Nary a bird f].ies by, wings whipping

The thick air, where an immense sun courses.
Sometimes a boa, warmed in its sleep,
Undulates its back of sparkling scales.

The fiery space likewise bums below the clear skies.

But while all sleeps in mournful solitude,
The rough elephants, slow and hardy travelers,
Cross deserts to reach their native land.

From a point on the horizon, like brown masses,

They come, raising dust, and one can see,
So as not to stray from the straightest path,
They crush the dunes under their broad feet.

At the head is an old chief. His body

Is scratched like a tree trunk worn away by time;
His head is like a rock and his spine
Arches powerfully with every movement.
 Never slowing, never hastening his march,
He guides his dusty companions to their sure destination;
And digging a sandy fw:row behind,
The massive pilgrims follow their patriarch.

Ears spread, trunks between their teeth,

They push on, eyes closed. Their stomachs beat and smoke,
And their sweat rises like mist in the burning air;
26
And a thousand eager flies buzz round them.

But what matters thirst and the voracious flies,

And the sun cooking their black and wrinkled backs/
While walking they dream of their forsaken country,
Of the forests of figs that shelter their race.

They will see again the river running from the great peaks,
Where, roaring, the enormous hippopotamus swims,
Where, lit by the1,pli)on, their forms visible,
They would go down to drink, crushing down the rushes.

And so, full of courage and slowness, they pass

Like a black line on the eternal sands;
And the desert takes back its stillness
When the ponderous travelers disappear on the horizon.
LECONTE DE LISLE, "The Elephants"
The Propeller eJ the Fin

For thousands of years, small boats and.galleys were propelled by the

energy of rowers. The oar imitates the fish's fin and propels the boat
in a discontinuous manner. This is the "stroke of the oar." Then the
propeller-whose effect is continuous-was invented, but a greater
source of energy was needed for it. This source could only be a motor.
The history of the conquest of the skies is even more instructive.
As long as the designers of aircraft, imitating birds, equipped them
with flapping wings, the flying machines were incapable of taking
off. What the "stroke of the oar" could do on the water was impossi•
ble for the "stroke of the wing." There too it was necessary to wait for
the propeller and the continuous power furnished by a motor.
Nature does not know the wheel, undoubtedly because nature is
accumulation, maturation, aging, all things that negate the wheel,
symbol of an indefinite return to the starting point. In the animal
world, nature proceeds by discontinuous movements. Truly, our
arms and our legs are made to execute a variety of movements. When
our legs walk, they accomplish a repetitive but discontinuous action
that one can break· down into several stages. Very early, man in•
vented the wheel and substituted the continuous movement of the
machine for the discontinuous movements of the slave or the ani•
mal. If it is true that pre-Columbian civilizations did not know the
wheel, it is because they had stayed close to nature to the point of
monstrosity.
We have been able to trace the birth of the clock to the invention of
the escapement, which transforms the discontinuous movement of
the balance wheel into the continuous rotation of the hands.
Of aH the discontinuous movements of the living organism, the
beating of the heart is undoubtedly the most popular, for all the sym·
bolism of life and love associated with it. But, there too, human
technique intervenes, substituting the continuous for the discon­
tinuous. Artificial hearts, which we will soon be able to insert in the
chests of sick people, will not beat. They are turbines whose move-
ment is a continuous rotation. The doctor's traditional "taking the
pulse" of the patient will no longer occur: there will be no pulse.
It is true that of all the muscles in the body, the heart is the one
whose discontinuity comes closest to a continuous movement. This
is especially true of the way it rests. While the body's immobility
during the hours of sleep constitutes its normal rest, the heart, on the
other hand, beats uninterruptedly from birth to death. It's not that it
never rests, but that it does so during the fraction of a second that
separates the beats. In other words, its rest, its sleep, its holidays are
pulverized and closely combined with its work.
These holidays of the heart, so unique, are an ideal reserved for the
privileged few. Having a job so well integrated into daily life, so well
paced in its phases of effort and maturation that it contains in itself
its rest and its vacation, is the privilege of the artist, or at least the
artistic craftsman, th�aristocrat of work. Which is what the heart is,
·'li:f"'�
precisely because it fuses the continuous and the discontinuous.

On 20 June I 849, two identical steamers equipped with 400-horsepower

engines, one with a propeller, the Niger, and the other with paddle
wheels, the Basilick, were invited by the British Admiralty to play "tu.g­
of-war" on calm seas: theiI sterns were attached by a solid cable (it had
to be, to hold up under 800 horsepower!), and they began to pull. The
poor Basilick, with its paddle wheels, which because of the calm seas
were nevertheless operating under optimal conditions, was shamefully
pulled backwards at a speed of one and a half knots!
TEAN MERRIEN, The Great History of Ships
The Willow eiJ the Alder

Vegetation is the faithful reflection of the environment in which it

grows and, more precisely, of its hydrology. There are the fleshy
plants of countries where warm waters abound, the thorny bushes of
deserts, the mosses of cold and humid regions.
The willow and the alder grow next to waters with diametrically
opposed spirits. The alder is the tree of dead and dark waters. It is the
lone vertical shape to be found in the misty plains of the north. Its
season-is autumn; its fish, the silent and muddy carp. It prefers to
grow in peat bogs and swamps. Its bark-when combined with fer­
ruginous preparations-yields a black dye used by hatters. There is
no better tree from which to make charcoal. Its bark is an astringent
medicine.
The alder made its entrance into poetry and music thanks to Goe­
the and Schubert. Yet it all started with a misunderstanding. Johann
Gottfried von Herder, while collecting Nordic legends, brought one
back about the King of the Elves, who abducted children. Goethe
would probably not have reacted to this Elfenk.onig, which was de­
void of much interest. But he mistakenly read Erlenk.onig lalder­
king), and the evocation of this sinister tree kindled his imagination.
He wrote his famous ballad about the alder-king, which Schubert set
to music some years later.
Unlike the alder, the willow grows beside clear streams. It is the
tree of fresh and singing running water. Its season is spring; its fish,
the trout, to which Schubert dedicated one of his most famous quar­
tets. The willow has, however, a special relationship with death: the
weeping willow is a classic decoration for graves. But its branches,
bendi ng gracefully backwards, mirror a gentle and smiling sadness.
The incarnation of this death is named Ophelia lfrom Shakespeare's
Hamlet). Desperate, she drowns herself in a river; but her death
is enshrouded in flowers and music. She is the sister of the Greek
nymphs and the Germanic nixies.
The willow gave humanity its most beneficial and most popular
drug, whose secret, however, still remains hidden: acetylsalicylic
acid, better known by the name aspirin.

"Who rides there so late through the night dark and drear!
The father it is, with his infant so dear;
He holdeth the boy tightly clasped in his arm,
He holdeth him safely, he keepeth him warm.

"My son, wherefore seek'st thou thy face thus to hide!"

"Look, father, the Erl-King is close by our side!
Dost see not the Erl-King, with crown and with train{"
"My son, 'tis the mist rising over the plain."

"Oh come, thou dear infant/ Oh come thou with me!

Full many a game I will play there with thee;
On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,
My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold."

"My father, my fjrf:;r, and dost thou not hear

The words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear!"
"Be calm, dearest child, 'tis thy fancy deceives;
'Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves."

"Wilt go, then, dear infant, wilt go with me there!

My daughters shall tend thee with sisterly care;
My daughters by night their glad festival keep,
They'll dance thee, and rock thee, and sing thee to sleep."

"My father, my father, and dost thou not see,

How the Erl-King his daughters has brought here for me!"
"My darling, my darling, I see it aright,
'Tis the aged gray willows deceiving thy sight."

"I love thee, I'm charmed by thy beauty, dear boy!

And if thou 'rt unwilling, then force I'll employ."
"My father, my father, he seizes me fast,
Full sorely the Erl-King has hurt me at last."

The father now gallops, with terror half wild,

He grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child:
He reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread,
The child in his arms finds he motionless, dead.
GOETHE, "The Erl-King"1
Animal ev Vegetable

The most obvious difference distinguishing the vegetable from the

animal arises from the mobility of the animal. The plant is fixed to
the ground, while the animal possesses members-legs, wings, fins­
that allow it to move in its environment. The very essence of the
plant is the current it establishes between the depth of the earth into
which it thrusts its roots and the ethereal heights where its leaves
tremble. The root shuns light. The leaf seeks light. This is expressed
by the terms negative phototropism for the root and positive pho­
totropism for the leaf. The trunk-or the stem-is midway between
these opposing tendencies. But each is vertical, and both contribute
to the immobilization of the vegetable.
So the plant's big problem will be the scattering of its seed, a task
necessary because those that fall at the very foot of the plant have
little chance of flourishing. The variety of methods used by plant
species to disperse their seed is astounding. There are the lime tree's
bracts that spin through the air like little helicopters, the fruits of
certain cacti that explode like bombs, the capitula of the burdock
that stick to the fur of animals, the succulent berries whose seed,
when eaten, germinate in the excrement, and so forth. One could say
that the plant observes, envies, and seeks to exploit the animal that is
so marvelously mobile.
But the animal's ability to move is dependent on muscle, which
functions by using the energy released by the formation of carbon
dioxide [CO2). The chlorophyllian function of the plant, on the con­
trary, uses solar energy to break down the carbon dioxide and make
the separate elements available to the animal. In short, the profound
difference between the animal and the plant is that the plant per­
forms an analysis of CO2, and the animal a synthesis.
For a long time it was thought that herbivorous animals fed on
plants. Recently it was discovered that in reality these plants, ab­
sorbed into the animal's stomach, serve to feed a culture of bacteria­
unicellular animals-that constitute the true food of the herbivore. A
 herbivore is thus a particular type of carnivore characterized by its
unicellular prey.
The carnivorous animal eats herbivorous animals. The li.on de­
vours the gazelle, and man the rabbit. This is because the flesh of
carnivorous animals is hardly appetizing. By forcing a carnivorous
animal to eat a vegetarian diet-feeding, for example, corn or po­
tatoes to a fox in captivity-it can be made fit for human consump-
32 tion. Some farmers make this their speciality. Some carnivores, how­
ever, seem -to have a particular taste for carnivorous prey. The lynx,
fond of cats, weasels, and so forth, is such an animal. These are called
superpredators.
Man is awed by the majesty of the tree and the immediate adapta­
tion of the animal to its environment. A great plane tree shaking
its mane of leaves in the wind, a seagull skimming the crest of the
waves, are sights that swell the heart with joy and inspire respect. Yet
the obvious power of both hide a fragility that must make us fear the
worst. Recently we have discovered that nature is threatened with
death by the pullulation of human vermin.

In this world that we don each morning lil<e an old, worn coat, com­
pletely immunized against surprise, the tree is the only shape which,
from time to time, for certain brief stupefying moments where habitua­
tion is scraped from my eyes, appears to me as absolutely incredible. .
This afternoon, for example: looking at the trees scattered over the prai­
ries of Batailleuse Island, grazing in the rainy fog, suddenly more dis­
orienting than dinosaurs.
JULIEN GRACQ, Lettrines
The Railroad etJ the Highway

Children growing up before 19 50 were very lucky. They were able to

witness the most beautiful sight ever seen: a steam locomotive com­
ing into a station. Indeed, nothing bigger, hotter, stronger; noth­
ing more majestic, murmuring, sighing, blowing, graceful, elegant,
erotic, powerful, and feminine has ever been seen than a steam loco­
motive. Only one job seemed attractive to little boys of that time:
train engineer. Even more so because the man who fulfilled this gran­
diose function presented a head superbly masked in soot, upon which
sat an enormous pair of racing goggles.
Emile Zola understood perfectly this splendor of the locomotive,
because his novel The Human Animal tells a love story about an
engineer and his locomotive. Her name is Lison, and her steel belly
burns with all the fires of passion. To be sure, the phenomenon of the
railroad could not have escaped this great visionary. During Zola's
lifetime, 20,000 kilometers of railways were built, with all the requi­
site tunnels, viaducts, stations, and houses for the grade-crossing
keepers, spreading all over France and linking the smallest villages.
And it's worth noting that at the time everything was done by harid­
shovel, pick, mining-tool-and with mules and donkeys.
The world of the railroad is above all the company of railroad men,
a hereditary caste showered with privileges and subtly hierarchical.
Punctuality is its religion because the trains must circulate through-.
out the network with all the precision of the stars moving across the
heavens.
This immense clock held for years a veritable monopoly over land
travel and transportation until the day the automobile came and
changi:;d everything. The railroad/highway opposition begins with
an option all the more striking because it seems completely arbi­
trary: the train keeps to the left, the car to the right. But what is most
important is the choice of flexibility versus regularity. The driver
leaves when he likes and takes the itinerary of his choice. It is also
 true that he pays for this freedom with a lack of safety and an unpre­
dictable arrival time. While the train is magnificently impervious to
the vicissitudes of the weather, the automobile suffers cruelly from
snow, ice, and fog. Freedom, yes, but at the risk of accidents-perhaps
fatal-and breakdowns or traffic jams.
As for the professionals of the highway, they are in each and every
way the opposite of their counterparts on the railroad. Fiercely indi-
34 vidualist-they often own their vehicles-the "strong arms" [gros
bras] maintain a frenzied pace in order to make a profit. And they are
winning their battle with the railroad. In all countries of the world,
the railroads' deficits are increasing each year, and entire networks
are being abandoned as unprofitable. Some people regret this as the
passing of a certain kind of civilization.

Lend me your great noise, your great speed so smooth,

Your nocturnal glide across Europe illuminated,
0 l=y train! AndfU:z� disturbing music
That whispers along your corridors of gilded leather,
While behind the lacquered doors, with heavy copper latches,
Millionaires sleep.
I wander along your corridors, humming an air,
And I follow your journey toward Vienna and Budapest,
Adding my voice to your hundred thousand voices,
0 Harmonika-Zug!
VALERY LARBAUD, Odes
Pierrot etJ Harlequin

Along with Columbina and Scaramouche, Pierrot and Harlequin are

the principle figures of the Italian commedia dell'arte. There are
Pulcinella, Mattamoros, Scapino, and so forth, as well. These charac­
ters are given to us with their traditional costumes and personalities.
It is up to the actor to improvise his discourse within a framework
agreed upon by his partners.
Pierrot is dressed in a loose, flowing, black-and-white costume. He
is naive and shy, prefers night to day, and speaks of love with the
moon. He is also sedentary.
Harlequin is dressed in tights decorated with diamond shapes of
every color-except white or black. He wears a mask, while Pierrot is
simply powdered. He is agile, inventive, insolent, and a friend of the
sun. Nothing ties him down. He is as fickle as he is nomadic.
One of the scripts of the commedia dell'arte shows the inconstant·
Colombina hesitating between these two types of men, letting herself
be seduced by the more brilliant and amusing-Harlequin-and then
bitterly regretting this choice. This schema is so influential that we
find it in numerous classical or popular works. For example, in Mo­
here's The Misanthrope, Alceste is Pierrot, Philinte is Harlequin, and
Celimene experiences the hesitations of Colombina between them.
French cinema offers us at least two versions of this trio. In Marcel
Pagnol's The Baker's Wife (r939)-based on a story by Jean Giono­
the baker Raimu watches his wife leave with a handsome young
shepherd. Then there is Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise (1945),
in which Arletty is seduced by the Harlequin Frederic !Pierre Bras­
seur), although she would have found happiness with the shy and
silent Baptiste !Jean-Louis Barrault).
Michel Tournier, with Pierrot or the Secrets of the Night, reduced
this story to its fundamental philosophical qualities. For the seduc­
tive colors of the painter Harlequin are condemned by the baker
Pierrot as artificial, poisonous, and superficial. Pierrot, on the con-
trary, lays clairn to colors that are substantial, deep, authentic: the
blue of the sky, the red of the fire, the gold of bread and brioches.
Colors that smell good and are nourishing. Thus Harlequin appears
as the man of accident, while Pierrot is the man of substance.

De deu:x choses l'une.

I:aut.re, c'est le soleil.

Of two things, the (moJone.

The other is the sun. 1
JACQUES PRE VERT, Paroles
Nomad eiJ Sedentary

Human history began with a fratricidal murder. One of the brothers

was Cain, who cultivated the earth. The other was Abel, who raised
animals. Cain was sedentary and surrounded his buildings with
walls, his fields with fences. Abel and his children drove before them
immense flocks of sheep and goats over prairies without borders or
owner_s. The conflict was inevitable, a conflict that, in diverse forms,
marks all human history.
For it had to happen that Abel's flocks would invade Cain's crops
and blindly devastate them. The angry Cain rose up against his
brother, and the argument ended in Abel's death. Yahweh was greatly
irritated and inflicted upon Cain the most painful punishment possi­
ble for a gardener: to leave, to become himself a nomad as his brother
had been. So Cain went away, leaving his orchards and vegetable
gardens behind. But he did not go far. He soon stopped and built
Enoch, the first city. Thus the uprooted farmer had become an archi­
tect and city.dweller: a new kind of sedentary lifestyle.
Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, the American
frontier was crisscrossed by great herds of steers and cows, which
cowboys led to the new lands of the west. But as time went on, newly
arrived settlers farmed the land, covering the prairie with fields of
wheat and corn. From then on the passage of the herds became an
intolerable scourge. The open or latent war between cowboys and
homesteaders took a decisive turn in favor of the homesteaders in
1873 when one of them, J. F. Glidden, applied for a patent for barbed
wire. Soon he constructed a factory in De Kalb, Illinois, for the large­
scale manufacture of his product.
There have been countless versions of this never-ending battle be•
tween nomads and sedentaries. The Tuareg of the Sahara, reducing to
slavery the black farmers of the oases, were only reproducing the
schema of the noble European knights-whose emblematic animal,
the horse, is above all an instrument of travel-and who kept serfs
attached to the land ("villeins"). More recently, we have witnessed.
Nazi ideology celebrate the communion of man with his land (Blut
und Boden), vowing to destroy Gypsies and Jews, nomads "without
fire or land, therefore without faith or law" (Nazi slogan). And period­
ically, populations revolt against projects such as new highways or
airports, destroyers of the quality of life.

That tribe of prophets with the burning eyes

Is on the road, their babies on their backs,
Who satisfy their appetite attacks
With treasured breasts that always hang nearby.

On foot, with weapons shining, go the men

Beside the carts in which their people lie,
With sorrow-laden eyes searching the sky,
Yearning for vanished chimeras again.

The cricket, �psees them pass along,

Deep in his lair redoubles his shrill song;
Cybele, their friend, augments her greenery,

Turns rocks to springs, brings f].owers from the sand

Before these sofourners, empowered to see
Their future darkness, that familiar land.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, "Gypsies Travelling"'
 Master ei) Servant

The official superiority of the master over the slave is expressed above
all in material terms. The master commands. He is rich, powerful,
well dressed, well nourished. And the materially inferior position of
the slave can result in the debasement of his soul. Under the influence
. of his condition, he can become "servile," a lowly flatterer, liar, thief,
and s9 forth. The master will not fail to invoke this servility of the
soul to justify his own advantages, as if the servile condition were the
consequence-and not the cause-of a servile character.
Yet in many cases the slave or the servant manifests qualities that
his master does not possess. There are obviously those that make
him a "model servant": devotion, integrity, sobriety, and so forth.
One is reminded here of the "big-hearted servant." In fiction, theater,
and opera, the master-servant couple is even more important than
the couple in love. And it is on stage that the theme of the superiority
of the servant over the master is most fully exploited.
It all begins with the couple Epictetus-Epaphrodite. Epictetus, a
Stoic philosopher, was the slave of Epaphrodite, a freed slave of Nero.
The legend tells how one day his master was crushing his leg in a
torture device. "You're going to break it," Epictetus said calmly. And
when his leg was indeed fractured, he added: "I told you sol" In the
couple Don Quixote-Sancho Panza of Cervantes's book (r605-15),
Sancho Panza incarnates the good sense of the common folk in con­
trast to Don Quixote's heroic folly. He is naive and sly, selfish and
devoted. He follows his master to protect him, and slowly but surely
he is won over by his dreams.
The couple formed by Don Juan and Leporello in the comedies and
operas in which they appear after T1ISO de Molina's original play
(1630), or that of Almaviva and Figaro in Beaumarchais's comedy
(1775) and Mozart's opera (1786), do not achieve nearly the same
profundity. But the French Revolution is approaching. Almaviva is
an aristocrat who has suffered nothing but the "pain of birth," and the
couple possesses a new political dimension.
 The Friday of Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) adds a
higher human meaning to the classic character of the servant. First,
Robinson saves Friday's life, for which Friday will always be grateful.
Then Robinson strives to inculcate in Friday the truths of his religion
and his civilization, which, for him, are absolutes. Thus their rela­
tionship takes on an added value of adoption and catechesis.
This profundity of the master-servant relationship will not resur-
40 face-and then in quite a different sense-until Goethe's Faust ( 1808 ).
For if Mephisto becomes by signed contract Faust's servant, he is a
superhuman servant, the Devil himself. From then on, when Meph­
isto carries out Faust's orders, it is a battle between God and Satan in
which Faust's soul is at stake.

Gold is the best servant and the worst master.

PROVERB
August etJ the White Clown

At first the white clown was alone in the ring of the little country
circus. Dressed in silk, hair powdered, a highly arched eyebrow ex­
pressing haughty surprise; wearing fine polished shoes, legs elegantly
clad in white stockings, this lord dazzled the country folk who came
to laugh and be amazed. It was among them that he found a victim.
He chose the most bewildered and awkward person, the one with the
reddestface. He had him enter the spotlight in the ring, and soon, at
his expense, the crowd was collap sing in laughter.
And so August was born. For soon the act seemed to work better
when an assistant was planted in the audience, responding to the
white clown in a manner rehearsed in advance. The red clown is
the complete opposite of the white clown. Resembling a wino, nose
covered by a ball of crimson celluloid, a confused expression, huge
mouth, walk handicapped by enormous clodhoppers: everything
about him attracts blows and gibes.
But the red clown had his revenge. Little by little he became the
center of the act. Soon it seemed that he was the star and the white
clown was demoted to the role of the straight man. Thus the greatest
August in the history of the circus, the Swiss Grock, having devoted
a lifetime to perfecting his act, was able to perform a two-hour show
alone, with no need of a partner.
It must be said that these two clowns incarnate two opposite aes­
thetics of laughter. The white cultivates insolence, mocking, irony,
the double entendre. He is a master of derision in the second degree.
He makes us laugh at others, at one other: August. But he himself
keeps his distance, he remains safe, out of harm's way; the storm of
laughter he unleashes does not splash him, for it is a shower aimed at
the red clown, whose function is to accept it.
The red sets himself up for all sorts of abuse, stretching his speech,
his dress, and his facial expressions to the height of the grotesque. He
does not have the right to be handsome, witty, or even pitiful, be-
 cause that would negate the kind of laugh he is supposed to inspire.
Nothing is too elegant for the white: feathers and down, lace and
taffeta, strass and sequins. Nothing is burlesque enough for the red: a
wig that turns around, a cardboard head with a hidden noisemaker, a
giant shirtfront, celluloid cuffs.
These two characters are also found in life in variable proportions,
often minute, but nevertheless visible. Some people beat their chests
42 and declare the crowd a witness of their sincerity or their misfortune.
They offer themselves up for society's admiration, pity, or even scorn.
This is the red tendency of a Rousseau, a Napoleon, a Mussolini. On
the contrary, the white bent of a Voltaire or a Talleyrand creates
sarcastic witnesses of their times, clever diplomats, schemers, those
who prefer to observe and operate without exposing themselves to
danger, to win without jeopardizing their freedom, 1;heir possessions,
or their selves. It would be easy to find traces of white and red in
most of the Fifth Republic's politicians. De Gaulle was obviously a
big red clown. We find�; traditional August in a Georges Marchais,
but there are also traces of red in Jacques Chirac and even in Ray­
mond Barre. On the other hand, Fran<;ois Mitterrand, Valery Giscard
d'Estaing, and Edouard Balladur are white clowns of the purest ilk.

When I make myself up as August,

Ifeel like I'm making myself beautiful.
ANNIE FRATELLINI
 The Tree eiJ the Path

The one is vertical, the other horiZontal. But most importantly, the
tree is fixed, a symbol of stability, whereas the path is an instrument
of circulation. If one looks at a landscape from this point of view­
hillsides, woods, and houses but also rivers and railways-one no­
tices that its harmony depends on a subtle balance between its seden-
. t ary bodies and its lines of communication.
Among these things, then, some are neutral and the eye of the
observer can just as well scan as stare at them. The hill, the valley,
the plain are like this. To them, one can add as much dynamism or
stability as one wants.
Other things are, by their very nature, rooted; these include prin­
cipally the tree and the house.
Finally, others are infused with a more or less impetuous dyna­
mism; these include paths and rivers.
Now, this balance is not often realized, and, if attained, does not
always endure. A lighthouse erected in the middle of reefs battered
by the·waves, a fortress perched on an inaccessible rock, a lumber­
jack's hut buried in a remote and seemingly unreachable woods are
all fatally shrouded in an inhuman atmosphere in which one senses
isolation, fear, even crime. This is because these structures are too
fixed, in a prisonlike stillness that makes one's heart sink. The.story­
teller who wants to make his audience tremble with fear knows how
to use these closed landscapes devoid of footpath or road.
But the inverse imbalance is no less serious, and it is the one
that modern life constantly provokes. For in cities there are two
functions, the first primary {living), the other secondary (moving
from place to place). Today living is spurned and sacdficed every­
where to movement, to the extent that our cities are deprived of
trees, fountains, marketplaces, and riverbanks in order to be more
"traffic friendly," and become less and less livable.
The very material of which a path is made plays as important a role
 as its width. Replacing a village gravel or dirt road by _a paved road is
more than a mere change of color: the dynamism of the village's
image is upset. Because the dirt or the gravel are rough, harsh, and
above all permeable surfaces, the eye finds itself arrested, the look is
transfixed, and, thanks to this permeability, a relationship is estab­
lished with the underground depths. The perfectly smooth and im­
permeable ribbon of asphalt, on the other hand, incites the eye to
44 drift, the look to slip away, projecting far away toward the horizon.
Trees and houses, weakened to their foundations by the road, appear
to vacillate, as if one were standing at the top of a sliding board. This
is why one will never be able to say enough about the good old cob­
blestone street. Paradoxically, it unites an indestructible polished
roundness with a stubborn individualism 'that creates irregularities
and grass-filled cracks that are a joy to the eye and the mind ... if not
to the automobile wheel.

The poplar in the ca�its head bowed, attracts to its branches the
leaves of the poplar standing next to the canal, its head raised.
. JULES RENARD, The Journal
Salt ei) Sugar

Salt and sugar have many things in common. On the table, they both
take the form of two white powders barely distinguishable to the eye.
They are not consumed in their pure state but are mixed in with
foods to give them additional flavor. One of their properties is to slow
down the spoilage rate of perishable foods, the one preserving meat
and fish (salt-cured foods), the oth�r fruits (jams).
One could add that each has its distinct origins, salt in the sea and
the mine (sea salt, rock salt), sugar in cane and beets. For thousands of
years rock salt was the object of a trade that set huge camel caravans
in motion across the African continent. As for sea salt, it must be
specified that one can extract 2 5 grams of salt per liter of water from
the ocean and 30 grams from theMediterranean.Although not a true
food-it has no calories-salt is an essential component of the living
organism. A lack of salt provokes serious problems and an urgent,
specific hunger.
For a long time, honey was the main sweetener in the Western diet.
Sugar was popularized in the sixteenth century with the massive cul­
tivation of sugar cane in tropical America. This farming was done by
black slaves, which very fittingly reminds us of cane sugar's brown
color. When the English established the continental system in 1811,
Napoleon decided to exploit the sugar beet on a lar ge scale, since the
German: physicist of French origin, Franz Achard, had perfected the
method of industrial sugar processing. Beet sugar is white.
Unlike salt, which is a symbol of wisdom traditionally associated
with maturity, sugar has a puerile connotation, especially when it
takes the form of candies and sweets. The very name "candy sugar"-
clarified with egg whites-evokes childlike candor. It is in this way
that one must interpret the contrast between the first meal of the day
in continental Europe and in the Anglo-Saxon countries. The English
breakfast, a meal for the true adult getting ready for the day's work,
includes ham, bacon and eggs, herring fillets, and so forth. The Euro-
 pean man leaves the nocturnal bed as a baby enters the world. The
first hour of the day is the repetition of infancy. Consequently, the
first meal must itself be childlike and is composed of milk, choco­
late, honey, and jams, with brioches and croissants. The baby bottle
is not far off.
Dieticians agree that the average person consumes an excessive
quantity of salt as well as sugar. This excess is a psychological char-
46 acteristic of modern man who, refusing adulthood, seeks refuge in
the irresponsibility of childhood (sugar) and old age (saltl at the
same time.

Sugar would be too expensive if it were not for the fact that the plant
producing it is worked by slaves.
Those I am talking about are black from head to foot; and their noses
are so flattened that it is" almost impossible to feel sorry for them.
The idea that God, in all his wisdom, put a soul, especially a good
soul, in such a black b'em°y; is inconceivable.
MONTESQUIEU, The Spirit of the Laws
The Fork eiJ the Spoon

The fork-literally "little fork" [fourchette] in French-might at first

seem to resemble a little hand. This is but a facade, for the four
fingers of the hand each have their personality, are prehensile, and
abpve all, are opposed by the thumb which sits opposite the plane of
fingers on the hand.One could not exaggerate the human importance
of this fifth finger opposing the other four. Paul Valery saw in it the
symbol of reflexive consciousness. Now, the fork has no thumb; it
might be a little hand, but one with four identical fingers lacking the
gift of prehensility.
In truth, the fork is made for "stabbing" solid food. It is a thrusting
instrument. But when turned around, it can fulfill a secondary func­
tion, gathering the mouthful like a sort of open-worked spoon or, on
the contrary, crushing it to a pulp against the bottom of the plate.
In vain do etymologists tell us that spoon [cuiller] comes from the
Latin cochlea, a snail's shell [coquille]; its relationship with collect
[ cueillir] is too obvious not to come to mind. And it is true that there
is something in the spoon that inspires us to collect our thoughts ...
The spoon cannot be separated from the evening soup. Soup means
bread dipped in the vegetable bouillon that reunites the family after
the day's work. The spoons mobilize. When the soup is thick, they
can stand up in it. When it is steaming hot, a noisy slurping mixes the
soup with cool air.
The devil is in the fork. He is often pictured with a pitchfork in
hand and probably uses it to hurl the condemned into the fires of hell.
While the spoon has a vegetarian vocation, the fork is a carnivorous
symbol. Long ago certain restaurants were called The Luck of the
Fork. That meant that for a sou, 1 one could dig one's fork-just once­
into the pot, having to be content with whatever it brought out.
The spoon, on the contrary, acts without malice, without risk. It
softly caresses the surface of the liquid, skimming it without vio­
lence. In the spoon there is a roundness, a concavity, a softness that
evokes the tender and patient act of the mother feeding baby food to
her little one.
The spoon and the fork each has its holiday gathering. The spoon
symbolizes the long and luminous night before Christmas. The fork
pierces the short and rowdy night of New Year's Eve.

Between mouth aIJ.d spoon there is often great trouble.

MEDIEVAL PROVERB
The Cellar etJ the Attic

Any true house has a cellar and an attic. These extreme places are
equally dark, but their darknesses are quite different. The light that
falls from the cellar window comes from the earth's surface-garden
or.street-and is almost never brightened by a ray of sun. It is an
impure, subdued, and deadened light. On the contrary, the attic win­
dow, opened directly in the roofing, looks out on the sky and its
azure, at.the clouds, moon, and stars.
Yet the cellar is a living place while the attic is a dead place. The
attic always looks like the balconies of the sky about which Baude­
laire speaks.where the dead years lean over, wearing old-fashioned
dresses. One finds the baby carriage, the dismembered dolls, the
straw hats full of holes, the picture book with yellowed pages, news­
papers celebrating an infinitely old event. The temperature varia­
tions are enormous, roasting in the summer and freezing in the win­
ter. One must take,care not to explore too deeply the contents of the
boxes and'trunks sleeping there, for one takes the chance of revealing
shameful or painful family secrets.
If the attic stairs have the dry and crisp lightness of wood, the ones
that descend into the cold and damp stone cellar smell of mold and
wet earth. Here the temperature is constant in all seasons and seems
warm in winter, cool in summer. For the attic is turned towards the
past, its function being memory and conservation, while in the cellar
the coming season is maturing. The braid of shallots swings under
the vault; there the wine ages, lying in iron racks. In one corner the
winter's pile of charcoal shines darkly. In the other stands the dull
heap of potatoes. Jars of jam and brandied cherries line the shelves.
Often father has installed the carpenter's workshop or the pottery
oven that is his Sunday hobby.
. . . and those who experienced the war do not forget that the cellar
provided the only shelter from bombs. And those who were twenty
during the Liberation danced in the cellars of Saint-Germain-des Pres.
 Yes, in every cellar promises of happiness are concealed. The living
root of the house is buried in its cellar. Memories and poetry float in
the attic. The emblematic animal of the cellar is the rat; the attic is
ruled by the owl, bird of Minerva, goddess of wisdom.

When we were ten, we found refuge in. the wooden walls and fl.oar of the
attic. Dead birds, old trunks broken open, extraordinary clothes: a bit
like the backstage of life.
50
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY, Southern Mail
Water etJ Fire

Water and fire have a close and most particular relationship to life.
For we feel-and science confirms-that all life comes from water.
The mammal emerges from the sea and the newborn out of the am­
niot_ic fluid. Marshlands teem with living germs.
Yet the flame fascinates us because it reveals the presence of a soul.
Life comes from water, but fire is life itself, because of its heat, its
light, and also its fragility. The will-o'-the-wisp performing its frail
and ephemeral dance above the black waters of the swamp seems to
be the poignant message of a living soul.
It would seem that, through cruelty or perversion, man strives to
bring together these two enemies. Not content to boil water on the
fire in his kitchen pots, he extinguishes his campfire at night by pour­
ing a bucket of water on the embers. But one thinks especially o£ the
fireman, the great organizer of the battle between the hydra and the
dragon, when he points the stream of his lance at the base of the fire.
This recalls the Spanish proverb, so profoundly pessimistic: "In the
battle between water and fire, fire always loses." Yes, pessimistic, be­
cause here fire symbolizes enthusiasm, the spirit of youth, enterpris­
ing zeal, and water the sad and discouraging enslavement of reality.
Yet human genius is not content with contrasting water and fire.It
has succeeded in synthesizing them in a single element: alcohol­
sometimes referred to as firewater. Alcohol is both water and fire. To
certain people, however, it shows only one of its two faces. According
to Gaston Bachelard's analysis in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, E.T. A.
Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe were both alcoholics who drew their
inspiration from their glass. However, "Hoffm.ann's alcohol is the
one that burns; it is marked by the sign of fire: qualitative, mas­
culine. Poe's alcohol is the one that immerses, granting oblivion and
death; it is marked by the sign of water: quantitative, feminine. The
genius of Edgar Allan Poe is associated with dormant or dead waters,
with the pond that reflects the House of Usher." 1
 Lower than I, always lower than I is water. It is always with lowered
eyes that I watch her. Like the ground, like a part of the ground, like a
modification of the ground.
She is bright and brilliant, formless and cool, passive and stubborn in
her only vice: heaviness; possessing exceptional means to satisfy this
vice: circumventing, penetrating, eroding, filtering.
This vice plays inside her as well: she collapses constantly, refuses
52 form at evezy moment, seems only to humiliate herself, lies on her belly
on the ground, almost a corpse, like the monks of certain orders. "Ever
lower" seems to be her motto. The contrary of excelsior.
FRANCIS PONGE, Things
History et:J Geography

History and geography. In other words, time and space, but not empty
and abstract milieus: a time in which events jostle one another, a
space cluttered with trees and houses.
When one thinks about it, it is strange that these two subjects of
knowledge and research are traditionally given to the same professor.
Can one be equally and simultaneously interested in history and
geography? Do they not involve opposite-if not incompatible­
tastes and options? The historian is a humanist in the broadest sense
of the term. Only human beings-and especially "great" human be­
ings-interest him. On the contrary, the geographer can take as an
object of study a desert, a virgin forest, or an archipelago of coral
reefs. His area of expertise includes fauna, flora, and mineralogy.
One also finds these two orientations in the domain of art. There
are "painters of history"-who until the last century held first place
in the academic hierarchy-and landscape painters. The latter, for a
long time relegated to second place by the painters of history, took
brilliant revenge with the impressionist revolution, to the point
where historical painting is almost absent from the twentieth cen­
tury. Almost-because Picasso's famous Guernica belongs indisputa­
bly to this fallen genre. All the same, it is quite remarkable that the
disasters of the Second World War, which inspired so many literary
works, are practically absent from art galleries and museums. Note
that one could consider portraits and nudes as "details" of historical
painting, while still lifes would belong to landscape art.
This same "key" works in the literary domain. Theater, from
Shakespeare to Victor Hugo, owes a great debt to history. The histor­
ical novel, represented by Walter Scott as well as by Aragon· and
Sartre, is a major literary genre. But one of the merits of these great
examples is to point us to their opposites-works in which landscapes
are more important than events. It is thus instructive to oppose Alex­
andre Dumas's "historical novel" to the"geographical novel" of Jules
 Verne or Karl May. In France, the most brilliant branch of this type of
geographical novel is the exoticism of Pierre Loti, Claude Farrere, or
PaulMorand. In the same"geographical" genre, one can oppose to this
avenue of exploration and Wanderlust an op�osite, sedentary inspira­
tion that delves into the inexhaustible mine of one territory. These
are the regional writers such as the Norman Jean de La Varende, the
Burgundian Henri Vincenot, Henri Pourrat from Auvergne, Pierre
54 Jakez Helias from Brittany, Henri Bosco from Provence, or, much
larger than -the somewhat reductive "regional" classification, Jean
Giono or evenFram;:oisMauriac. To these must be added the purest of
all, Julien Gracq, who, even in those works that have nothing to do
with his own life, never forgets the geography professor he was, under
the fruited name of Louis Poirier [poirier, pear tree]. These are all
writers for whom the earth, the shores, the waters and the forests, the
rain and the light play as vital a role as men and women.
The "geographical" w.riter is far from being timeless. Yet the tem­
porality in which he is i�;ted is not that of the historian. Historical
time is an irreversible succession of unpredictable and almost always
catastrophic events, the most common of which is war, the absolute
evil. Geographical time, by contrast, is inscribed in the regular cycle
of the seasons. Certainly, meteorology plays here its capricious and
unpredictable games. But even rain, storms, fog, and clear weather
obey more or less the order of the four seasons that array them in
their traditional colors: spring, pink; summer, green; autumn, gold;
winter, white.
Should we go further and dare to say that "geographical" inspira­
tion is fundaIIlentally optimistic, made of love of the native land in
its sedentary version and of the ardor of exploration in its nomadic
version? Whereas the historical novel borrows its somber colors from
the evil and ferocity of men of power?
These general considerations can illuminate many literary works
and furthermore suggest fruitful oppositions. Thus two German
writers belonging to the same generation, Thomas Mann jr875-
r955) and Herman Hesse (1877-r962.), can be better understood if
compared and contrasted like history and geography. Time-linear
and destructive, punctuated by catastrophic events-structures the
whole of the works of Thomas Mann, from Buddenbrooks, a chroni­
cle of the disintegration of one of Liibeck's great families, to Doctor
Faustus, embroiled in the torment of r9 3 3-45. Biological duration is
itself devastating, since the whole life of the hero Adrian Leverkiihn
is accompanied, punctuated, and brought to a head by the incubation
and revelation of syphilis, which begins by enhancing his natural
gifts and ends by driving him insane. It is difficult to give the flow of
time a more tragic meaning. The art in which Adrian's genius flowers
is music, in particular the dodecaphonic music-abstract, bloodless,
and bare-that Thomas Mann learned from his fellow exile in Cali- 55
fomia, Theodor Adorno.
Concerning Thomas Mann's relationships with the places he lived.
in it will be noted that th ey are always fortuitous: ordered by factors
external to the places themselves, such as family opportunities or
the vicissitudes of history. He chose Munich, California, and finally
Kilchberg on the shores of Lake Zurich only because of circumstance
and not because of the spirit of these different places.
In contrast to this, it seems as if certain writers listen to that spirit,
and, one could even say, sniff it out in order to find the climate that
suits them best from year to year. Friedrich Nietzsche's travels in
Italy and Switzerland are exempl ary from this point of view. Racked
with pain, he sought out the best air for his body and soul. Even the
local food was quite important to him. It is the same for Hermann
Hesse, who never quit searching for the best land to settle in. For
them, the journey is not at all an answer to some nomadic vocation.
Quite the contrary, they are sedentary men in quest of a definitive
place to put down roots. But the wandering can last an entire lifetime
if this place is found nowhere-the etymological translation of Uto­
pia. Such was the destiny, it seems, of Nietzsche. As for Hesse, his
last masterpiece-The Glass Bead Game-takes place in an imagi­
nary country and is a typical example of a utopian creation.

God designs the contoUis of geography,

but it is the Devil who writes History
in letters of blood.
ANGELUS CHOISELUS
Vertebrates eiJ Crustaceans

To defend against external attack, the living being has a choice be­
tween lightness-which favors avoidance and flight-and the se­
curity of armor and a shield that allows-but in part also imposes­
immobility.
The animals comprising the phylum of arthropods-such as crus­
taceans-have chosen the second solution. Their soft organs are en­
closed in chitinous shells offering considerable protection. But this
protection isolates them from others and impoverishes their ex­
changes with the outsip.e world. By contrast, vertebrate�-fish, birds,
-�tf-'"
amphibians, reptiles, mammals-arrange their organs along an inter-
nal skeleton. Arthropods have the hard parts-outside, the' soft parts
inside. Vertebrates have the hard parts inside, the soft parts outside.
For vertebrates this results in a vulnerability that could have been
fatal and caused their extinction, but which proved in fact to be an
immense advantage for the most endangered of all-the human being
-improving his ability to adapt to his environment and exploit his
resources. The original weakness of man-whose body does not even
have the protection of fur, scales, or feathers-was turned.into his
strongest advantage.
The history of armies and warfare illustrates the same alternative.
Warriors must choose between armor and shield-which protect but
weigh down-and agility without protection. Twice during the Hun­
dred Years War, at Crecy j1346) and Azincourt j1415), the French
knights enclosed in their armor were slaughtered by English archers,
lightly armed foot soldiers. The recent World Wars offer a contrary
example. All the offensives mounted by unprotected infantrymen
were bloody failures. Only heavily armored tanks could pierce a
defense armed with automatic weapons, as the German offensive
proved in May and fune I 940.
Turning to the mind, one must contrast the agility and open­
mindedness of skeptics to the paralyzing protection of dogmatic
thought. Under the shell of convictions, the believer enjoys a moral
comfort that he considers a just reward for his right-mindedness. Yet
in this comfort there is a great deal of deafness and blindness towards
others. Sometimes, however, the believer glimpses with envy the
skeptic's freedom, as did Francois Mauriac, fascinated by the fresh
and versatile mind of Andre Gide.

Inimitable Andre Gide! With what skillful feints could he dismiss his
57
heavily armed adversaries! How he could fell them one after the other,
as they crumpled in the crash of their: Maurrassian breastplates and
Thomist armor. And he, so agile in the doublet and cape of Mephis­
topheles (but wasn't he really Faust disguised in the devil's rags!), would
step over their: bodies, and run oft to pursue his pleasure or his reading.
FRAN(.;OIS MAURIAC, Memoires interieurs
Environment eiJ Heredity

. A living being is a unique hereditary formula thrust into a unique

environment for the duration of a lifetime. The hereditary formula
comes from the immense lottery formed by the pyramid of ascen­
dants, each of which has its own hereditary formula. The number of
these ascendants increases geometrically, doubling with each gener­
ation. If I go back ten generations, I can already enumerate 2,048
ascendants. Now, heredity obeys the rule of atavism, which means
that one receives hereditary traits not only from one's father and
mother but from the en t,�!Y of one's ancestors. A given physical or
psychological characteristic can thus come from an ancestor who
lived several centuries earlier. Certain traits are more persistent than
others, which they tend to suppress from generation to generation.
We call these dominant characteristics, and the others recessive
characteristics. Thus the brown eyes of one parent are inherited by
more children than the blue eyes of the other parent. Yet blue eyes,
even as they become rarer, will always reappear in a given descendant
due to the rule of atavism.
The living being is also molded by the environment, which forces
upon it a more or less necessary and sometimes indispensable adap­
tation. The nonhereditary nature of acquired characteristics makes
human progress by this path impossible. Even though all humans
c learn to speak and most learn to read, children continue to be born
knowing neither the one nor the other. The Darwinian theory of
natural selection explains how species evolve in spite of these non-.
hereditary acquired characteristics. It assumes that hereditary char­
acteristics appear as a result of chance mutations. Their carriers are
disadvantaged or advantaged in survival and reproduction according
to whether these characteristics are favorable or unfavorabl�.
Identical twins (that is, homozygous twins, formed from the same
egg) constitute a fertile ground for the study of the relative impor­
tance of heredity and environment in individuals. Their heredity
being the same, one can suggest that any differences appearing be­
tween identical twins can be attributed to the environment. If this
were the case, however, the human condition would be quite con­
temptible, since the role of freedom would be reduced to nothing.
Yet a different conclusion is reached after observing identical
twins over a long period of time. As the years go by, in fact, they
continue to become more and more different from one another, even
if they remain together and share the same environment. This proves s9
that, besides environment and heredity, a third factor intervenes in
building personality. One must call this third factor free decision, or
simply freedom. It even seems as if twins living together lean heavily
on or against one another in some way in order to mark their differ-
ences. Each thus becomes even more different than he or she would
have been living in a dissimilar environment without having as a
close neighbor a sibling working to amplify their differences.

_All_ bodies are created by given mothers, given seed,

and grow while maintaining their primary essence.
LUCRETIUS, De reru.m natu.ra
Pleasure eiJ Joy

God created man in his image, the Bible tells us. We do not know
much about this God except that he is the Creator. Man's original
vocation is thus creation. To be man is to create, and a life devoid of
creation would not be worth living because it would be missing the
divine spark that makes it a human life.
Yet what kind of creation are we speaking of? There are a thousand
ways to create, from the loftiest to the most modest. One can repaint
a bedroom, plant a flower, draw a picture, compose a symphony with
chorus, or found a natio� �e can also give birth to and raise a child,
#
which is perhaps the most beautiful yet the most dangerous of all
creations.
Now, the feeling that accompanies every creation is joy, which is
nothing but the affective aspect of the creative act. All the other
rewards of creative work-money, honors-are extrinsic and acciden­
tal. Joy alone is intrinsic to creation. That is the meaning of the verse
that concludes each day of creation in Genesis: "And God saw that it
was good."
Pleasure is something else again. If it is joy that colors creation, it
is pleasure that accompanies consumption, that is, a form of destruc­
tion. The bake_r who invents a cake recipe and then bakes the cake
experiences joy. If I am hungry and I eat the cake, I experience plea­
sure. But the cake is gone ...
This is why in general moralists disapprove of pleasure. At best,
pleasure is an artifice used by nature to help an animal stay alive, just
as pain helps it to avoid destructive aggression. Yet pleasure can eas­
ily be perverted and become a companion to fatal habits such as
intoxication by drugs or alcohol. Unfortunately, the abhorrence of
pleasure-characteristic of certain mystics-bears a strong resem­
blance to a hatred of life and inspires equally suicidal behavior (mor­
tification, fasting, and so forth).
There is, however, one area-sexuality-where pleasure and joy
mingle indissolubly, and this is why it is incomparable. For sexual
desire is a hunger for the other, resembling in many ways a can­
nibalistic drive. The violent taste for the flesh of the other, for its
smell, for the humors it secretes, has an obviously anthropophagous
aspect. And when sex does not advance beyond this level, it may
degenerate into sadism. But this destructive energy is at the same
time a creative act, and sexual pleasure finds its fulflllment in the life
of the couple. For the meeting of two people who love one another 61
inaugurates a new life, unexpected, incomparably richer than the
simple sum of each one's individual traits.

He who is sure, absolutely sure of having produced a viable and lasting

work, has no more interest in praise, and he feels himself beyond glory
because he is a creator and knows it, and the joy he derives from it is
divine.
HENRI BERGSON, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Apollo eiJ Dionysus

In Greek mythology, Apollo is the god of poetry, medicine, architec­

ture, and especially of light and the sun.
Dionysus-the Greek equivalent of the Latin Bacchus-was sym­
bolized by wine and presided over the riotous country festivals called
Bacchanalia.
With Nietzsche and The Birth of TI:agedy (1871)1 these tutelary
figures become the poles of two personality types and two opposing
categories of artistic inspiration.
Apollo, according to _Nietzsche, is without question the god of
poetry, but poetry in th�- Homeric vein, epic poems about gods and
heroes. He is also.the patron of statuary, but his triumph is architec­
ture, an art of balance and symmetry. His light falls vertically from
the sun itself. He is the god of the eternal and immobile zenith.
But the shadow of a doubt slips over Apollo. Does he really exist?
Could he be a dream, splendid to be sure, but unreal? This ambiguity
is illustrated by the historical examples of certain rulers, most nota­
bly those who bestowed on themselves the epithet of "great," from
Alexander III of Macedonia to Frederick II of Prussia. Louis XIV called
himself the Sun King, and no one made a more brilliant claim to be of
Apollo's lineage. However, daily politics do exist, with their vicissi­
tudes and unethical acts. Apollo reigns. Yet one must also rule, and
one rules neither serenely nor innocently.
Here Dionysus makes his entrance. This madman knows exis­
tence and embraces it without qualms, even its most dubious as­
pects. He embodies fertility, and nothing is created without intoxica­
tion, without darkness, without taint. Because his is the cult of life,
he fully accepts that which is inseparable from life: violence, sick­
ness, and death. A joyous pessimism is his philosophy. His symbol is
wine-more specifically, red wine.
The epitome of Dionysian art is· music because it is duration,
movement, and change. And also because music can excite a crowd
in such a manner that it melts into a single soul.
The Apollonian hero, by contrast, is proud of his solitude and his
independence.
Friedrich Nietzsche dedicated his Birth of Tragedy to Richard Wag­
ner. After Classicism's sublime but cold and unreal paradise, Roman­
ticism seemed to Nietzsche a return to Dionysus. It was Wagner's ge-
nius, according to Nietzsche, to harmonize Apollonian construction 63
and the dynamic pessimism of Dionysus. Later he would turn away
from Wagner when he uncovered the Christian inspiration behind
Parsifal. From then on, Georges Bizet became Nietzsche's composer.

One must have a chaos in oneself

to give birth to a dancing star.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Fear eiJ Anxiety

"Fear of the policeman is the beginning of wisdom." Undoubtedly so

... but this venerable proverb implies that the fearful man deserves
contempt. The person who behaves properly only when threatened
with punishment-and if this threat disappeared would be capable of
the vilest deeds-is a good-for-nothing who adds cowardice to all his
evil tendencies.
Fear is induced by a man, an animal, someone or something clearly
perceived to be an enemy. It is humiliating because it is the anticipa­
tion of a defeat. The fearful man has aheady lost, and it is his own
fault. He is the slave of ;'{e��asters and the adversaries who surround
him. Sometimes he is depicted as soiling his pants.
In his famous short story "Fear, 11 Guy de ·Maupassant casts a bridge
between fear and anxiety. We must remember that he was writing
at a time when scientism claimed that mystery-the fruit of igno­
rance-was progressively disappearing thanks to the light of science.
Everything was scientifically explicable and only superstition could
still give rise to shadows around us. But Maupassant finds an other­
worldly fear once again in the eternal unconscious. "Only when fear
is mixed with a bit of superstitious terror from past centuries do we
experience the horrible convulsion of the soul that we call dread," he
writes. There is such a thing then as an atavistic fear, digging its roots
down to an ancestral past sleeping in our hearts; eternal humanity
trembles with us in the presence of mystery.
Anxiety has no precise object. Fear is caused by a hostile presence,
anxiety by absence. The most infantile form of anxiety is brought on
by darkness. It is the darkness itself that frightens-not the monsters
hiding in it. Another example is vertigo, which is anxiety brought on
by a void-not fear of falling. "The eternal silence of these infinite
spaces frightens me." Pascal's illustrious words designate three
sources of anxiety: silence, infinity, and eternity. The child walking
in the dark comforts himself with a song. Jean Cocteau tells that
when he tried this remedy, he ended up being terrified by the words
he invented to the song.
Anxiety lets man see his solitude, through which he perceives his
freedom and human dignity. It is the fruit of thinking and of culture.
"Down with schoolteachers, with brilliant professors, with all these
books that broaden the field of human anxiety. Back to the happy
past of our grandmothers," cried Pierre Loti ironically. While civiliza-
tion is a protective, reassuring cocoon, culture is a distressing win- 65
dow opening onto infinity.
For Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, anxiety is the revela­
tion of nothingness-as nausea signals the apparition of being. Mys­
tics see it as the narrow gate one must pass through in order to come
into the presence of divine infinity.

By anxiety and through overcoming anxiety,

eternal life is born from nothingness.
JAKOB BOEHME, Mysteriummagnum

The only cum for fear is to throw oneself

headlong into the will of God.
GEORGES BERNANos, Dialogue des Carmelites
Derision eiJ Celebration

"I never saw anything ugly," said Claude Monet. He shared this reso­
lutely optimistic eye with all the impressionists, for whom the world
was but a magic mottling of colors. Around the beginning of the
century, expressionism replied to this happy aesthetic with a strictly
opposite view, preferring the emotional shock inspired by a grimac­
ing face or a dramatic scene (Edvard Munch's The Scream, 1893) or
even pure and simple ugliness (Soutine, Bacon, Baselitz).
Literature also knows these two currents, one of celebration, the
other of derision. To ��, the beauty of the world, the greatness of
heroes, the grace of young women is simple, it would seem, but it is
no small ambition for one who is claiming to do original, creative
work. Certain poets like Jose-Maria de Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, or
Saint-John Perse excelled at it lin fact, one of Saint-John Perse's col­
lections of poetry is called Eloges (praise]). Poetry, it seems, is better
suited to celebration than to derision.
On the other hand, certain powerful works of prose are nothing but
monuments of derision, such as Saint-Simon's Memoirs, Marcel
Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, or' Louis-Ferdinand Celine's
lourney to the End of the Night. In all the societies crawling with
characters they place before us, there is not a single one who is not
grotesque, rotten, or repugnant in some way. By contrast, in Cha­
teaubriand's Memoirs from beyond the Tomb or Victor Hugo's Les
Miserables one breathes an air of somber grandeur that exalts and
swells the heart. Note that darkness has nothing to do with our
subject: the derisory and the sublime have their place in horror just as
they do in idyll.
This kind of differentiation must be handledwith caution and not
employed like a universal can opener. Some works resist it and gain
nothing from such an analysis; such is the case for Balzac's Human
Comedy orZola's Rougon-Macquart. Other authors' works can be
divided quite naturally into two massifs along these classifications.
This is true for Flaubert, whether he is writing The Temptation of
Saint Anthony, Salamb6, Saint Julian the Hospitaller, or Herodias on
the one hand or Madame Bovary, The Sentimental Education, or
Bouvard and Pecuchet on the other. (One could also say that there are
two Flauberts, the one in color, the other in black and white.) It is
amusing to compare in this way the opening scene of Salambo, the
Barbarian's feast, and the marriage banquet in Madame Bovary. In the
one everything is grandiose, in the other everything is ludicrous. One 67
would also see that if in derision humor is king, it is not by that fact
excluded from celebration. It just takes on an additional dimension.

The jester, because he is small, ugly, and uninhibited,

sees more things than the great lords and beautiful. women
of the court.
IBN AL-HOUDAIDA
Memory ei) Habit

The past, no matter how distant, never passes away. That was one of
the plays oh words with which Rene Le Senne embellished his phi­
losophy course at the Sorbonne. Yes, the past is present in a certain
way, but the fact is that it can be present in many ways. There is the
history that is in books. There are the objects that are in museums.
There are the buildings that are in cities. Each municipality has its
monument to the dead inscribed with the names of the young people
sacrificed. This memory is collective and is a part of what one
learns at school.
Yet there is also the individual memory, for each of us possesses his
own past that is illustrated by a little personal museum of letters,
photographs, and other souvenirs. These two types of memory con­
tribute to our feeling of well-being and equilibrium. People who are
uprooted suffer from floating in a country whose past is foreign to
them. As for amnesiacs, their vision of a world absolutely new at
each instant of their life is unimaginable for people with normal
memories.
The past formed by our early years-which Baudelaire called "the
green paradlse of youthful love"-can cause us a painful nostalgia and
the ardent desire to reconstitute or even relive those innocent times.
That is the general sense of the work of Marcel Proust, Remem­
brance of Things Past, his veritable personal archeology. Marcel
Proust uses a powerful lever, the affective memory that rises up at
the occasion of a tiny sensation-the taste of a madeleine dunked in a
cup of tea, for example-and brings to life with tremendous vitality a
whole past era.
According to Henri Bergson, this activity of the memory belongs to
the mind. Yet the past can also be inscribed in the body, which 're­
tains only motor and practical functions. The role of the brain is
precisely to elaborate the past for the needs of present life. It keeps
only the learned movement, eliminating the date and the circum-
stances that surrounded its acquisition. So when I play tennis, I take
advantage of all the tennis lessons I have taken but I don't evoke
them separately and singularly in my mind. This kind of conserva­
tion is called habit, and without this faculty we would know neither
how to speak or walk nor how to read or write. But these activities
are physical and concern the integration of our person into the con­
crete world. The tool of this integration is the brain, whose function
is to compress all the accumulated past, retaining only that which is 69
useful for the present situation. By contrast, the sleeper's dream cor­
responds to a relaxation of the cerebral filter and to the invasion of
the consciousness by a phantasmagoria of unused memories.
From this theory, Henri Bergson concluded that the mind was
probably immortal. For if the brain is nothing more than this limited
and utilitarian organ, its destruction by physical death does not nec­
essarily bring on the end of our mind.

My beautiful ship O my memory

Have we sailed far enough
In waters bad to drink
Have we sailed far enough
From the beautiful dawn to the sad evening!
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE, Poesies
Speech et) Writing

The man who writes is a solitary man addressing a solitary reader,

whether he be composing a love letter or an adventure novel. By
contrast, the man who speaks needs a listener, for the solitary word is
that of a fool. The political orator wants an enthusiastic crowd, the
religious preacher an attentive parish, the storyteller a village assem­
bly gathered around the fireplace, the praying man the immense and
invisible ear of God.
The spoken word crosses a short space but disappears in an instant,
whereas writing travels. across time and space. That is to say, the
spoken word is alive �;reas writing is dead. Writing cannot do
without the spoken word if it wants to live. In ancient times, people
read only aloud, so that a man having lost his voice due to the flu
could no longer open a book. In the same way, one first learns how to
read by reading aloud. Silent-or mental, or interiorized reading­
corresponds to a second stage.
The word is first. God created the world by naming it. It is the
Word of creation. Writing, which appeared thousands of years later,
flows from the word and needs it to stay alive. The whole history of
literature consists of writing constantly returning to this living and
life-giving source: the spoken language. A great author is one whose
voice we hear and recognize as soon as we open one of his books. He
has succeeded in fusing the spoken and written word. It is true that a
danger threatens writing that relies too heavily on the spoken word.
Writing that is excessively "spoken" can fall apart, just like a path
flooded with water ceases to be passable. We may note in passing that
Flaubert, when he shouted his rough drafts out loud in his"gueuloiI,"
was not attempting to irrigate his writing with the spoken word; he
was simply trying to file away all the rough edges that might impede
its pronunciation. For little prose is further removed from the spoken
word than Flaubert's. The voice of Flaubert is to be found instead in
his correspondence, and that is why it is appreciated by some even
more than his novels.
 The sermons .of great preachers whose texts have come down to us
raise a very interesting problem: How important was improvisation
-which true eloquence seems to require-in these sermons, and
were these texts not composed from memory, after the fact, and thus
dispassionately? This question applies particularly to Bossuet.

The human word is midway between

the muteness of animals and the silence of God.
71
LOUIS LAVELLE., La Parole et l'ecriture
Talent ev Genius

We must never lose sight of the fact that talent was originally a
Greek monetary unit of considerable value. It is sometimes men­
tioned in the parables of the Gospels. To have talent is to have talents
and thus to be rich. But what sort of wealth are we talking about?
The talented man is an artist. He paints, composes music, writes
verse or novels. What characterizes his works is that they are wel­
comed favorably by the public. The talented man knows how to
please. He is paid by his success. He is celebrated. He attracts notori­
ety and money. So w¥-p.un once more to the original meaning of
"talent" (currency).
The success inherent in talent is, however, not without its dan­
gers. To be worthwhile, any work must obey an internal necessity
that dictates its form and its tone, remaining independent of any
expected public reception. The artist who works as a function of
hoped-for success, striving to respond to the expectations he thinks
he has perceived in his society, will undoubtedly be successful but
will not create anything important. At most he will have clarified
and expressed the reveries and hopes floating around the great body
of the crowd. For one season, everyone will hum his song or read his
novel. Then song and novel will dissipate into forgetfulness. But the
author probably did not ask for anything more. The ephemeral is not
necessarily to be scorned. Some sculptors shape the ice of winter or
mold the sand of a beach. Why not?
The talented man, then, runs the risk of laboring at the beck and
call of popular culture. For want of anything better, the image of this
culture that he will leave behind will interest and perhaps even
charm posterity. It is in this way that we enjoy Beranger's songs or
Feydeau's comedies.
Conversely, the man of genius creates without worrying about the
public. He almost always paddles against the current. His works are
generally rejected, or else they gain acceptance because of their au-
thority but certainly not because of their appeal. The future belongs
to him but the present rejects him, sometimes so harshly that it
takes his life. One need only think of Van Gogh, so cruelly mistreated
by his times, so fanatically idolized by ours.
Van Gogh and Titian. Titian, so fully in accord with his society,
sought after by princes, popes, and emperors, amassed during a life­
time spanning almost one hunmed years an artistic production and a
fortune that were equally immense. Yet some art critics deny him 73
any trace of genius.
There is genius and there is talent. But below these two high levels
of creation, one must cite two other faculties that also play their role.
First, there is craft, or savoh:-faire, which one cannot overlook. It is
the ABCs of art, learned at a young age, in the studio, under the strict
authority of a master.
And then, far behind, mimicking the three others, is this rather
miserable quality: resourcefulness. The resourceful person some­
times manages to find an expedient to dupe the public, masking his
incompetence, his ignorance, and the poverty of his creativity.

Genius
Talent
Craft
Resourcefulness

One must amnit that every man-whoever he may be-is a mixture

of these four faculties. What is important is their proportion.

With talent, one does what one wishes.

With genius, one does what one can.
JEAN-AUGUSTE INGRES
 The Beautiful eiJ the Sublime

In beauty there is a balance, a stability, a perfection that gives the

perceiver a:happy feeling of serenity. Art culminates this way in the
meeting of Apollo, solar god of beauty, and Minerva, goddess of rea­
son and wisdom.
To this impassive couple Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Biith of TI:ag­
edy (1871), quite appropriately contrasted the troublemaker Diony­
sus, god of joy, drunkenness, and death. This new arrival in the ro­
mantic pantheon personifies the category of the sublime that Kant
opposes to the beaut�i,n his Critique of fudgement [1790). Before
him, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and Chateau-
. briand had celebrated the grandeur of the mountains, sea, and desert,
three natural settings that till then had only inspired horr01 in trav­
elers and artists.
Kant's task, then, is to provide a philosophical status to this feeling,
experienced certainly since the beginning of time, but whose theory
remained to be formulated. Contrasting the beautiful and the sub­
lime, he notes that a prairie dotted with flowers is beautiful, whereas a
raging storm is sublime. "Dark skin and eyes have more affinity with
the sublime; blue eyes and pale skin more affinity with the beautiful."
If the beautiful is finite and harmonious, the sublime is infinite and
dynamic. The sublime puts us in a state of vertiginous imbalance, a
strange mix of pleasure and terror. The beautiful is qualitative, the
sublime quantitative. Finally, the beautiful invites play, the divine
gratuitousness of a paradise without obligation or sanction, while the
sublime reflects theological, moral, or religious notions.
This opposition of the beautiful and the sublime is illustrated by
_ these visions of the Mediterranean given by two writers, contempo­
raries and childhood friends. For Paul Valery, the Mediterranean civi­
lization is symbolized by the sun, immobile at its zenith.
Quite opposite is the mind of Andre Gide, freed from the Protes­
tant city where he was prisoner and aspiring to the immensity that is
Africa.
 This tranquil roof where doves walk by,
Throbs between the pines, between the tombs.
Here impartial noon composes with f).ames
The sea, the sea always beginning anew.
PAUL VALERY, "The Graveyard by the Sea"

I spent the second night on the bridge. Great bolts of lightning flashed
far away in the diJ:ection of Africa. Africa! I repeated this mysterious
75
word, I filled it with terrors, seductive horrors, expectations, and my
gaze plunged wildly in the hot night towards an oppressive promise, all
wrapped in lightning.
ANDRE GmE, If It Die . . . An Autobiography
Culture ei} Civilization

As soon as a child is born into the world, he is assaulted by a multi­

tude of perceptions, then trained to perform a number of movements
and behaviors that depend on the place and time of his birth. He thus
learns to eat, play, work, and so forth as it is done in his native
environment, first in the faniily, then at school. But it is, of course,
the language he hears and learns that plays the principal role because
it molds his logic and sensibility.
We call civilization this baggage that is transmissible from genera­
tion to generation. For..example,
"'
rain-in an oceanic country-is a
material phenomenon unrelated to civilization. On the other hand,
the habit of carrying an umbrella-or disdaining the use of an um­
brella-is a fact of civilization. The sea, the mountain that a child
sees each time he goes outdoors are not products of civilization. By
contrast, the village church or the monument to the war dead are. No
one escapes this shaping that makes each one of us a civilized human
being hie et nunc.
But the child goes to school, and the knowledge he acquires there
can have two diametrically opposed functions. This knowledge can
flow within the elements of civilization that surround the child,
doing them no harm and even enriching them. For example, the
schoolchild learns the history of war and understands better the
meaning of the monument to the dead. Or religious instruction helps
him decipher the various symbols found in the church.
But the gifted high-school student is not content with the tradi­
tional textbooks that have been imposed upon him and that prolong
his lessons about civilization. He reads other books, goes to see films
and plays, associates with those more knowledgeable than he. In this
way he builds himseli a culture. And this culture is freely selected. It
will be scientific, political, or philosophical, as the student chooses.
In this way, .the young man maintains a certain distance from the
education he has received. He critiques it, he questions it, he rejects
parts of it. From then on, his knowledge goes beyond the limits of
civilization and attacks and partially destroys it. The monument to
the dead inspires antirnilitaristic talk. The church incites anticleri­
cal opinions.
Above all, the first lesson of culture is that the world is vast, the
past unfathomable, and that billions of men think and have thought
differently than we, our neighbors, and our countrymen. Culture
leads to the universal and engenders skepticism. Striving to widen 77
his ideas to a universal dimension, the cultivated man treats his own
civilization like a particular case. He comes to think that "the" civili -
zation, outside of which all is barbarism or savagery, does not exist,
but that there exist a multitude of civilizations, all of which deserve
respect. He condemns at the same time colonizers and missionaries,
finding both guilty of ethnocide.
He quickly becomes an object of scandal for the civilized man:
Renan, back in Treguier on vacation, his head crammed full of all the
knowledge he had accumulated in Paris, horrified the good priest who
had been in charge of his religious education. Indubitably, he had been
perverted by the big city. Paris was the kingdom of the Devil.
Civilizations can fight among themselves. The Christian West and
the Islamic East have made war. But within each civilization, the
cultured man is resented: he is a dangerously enervated deviate who
must be eliminated. Hallaj executed in Baghdad in 922 and Giordano
Bruno burned in Rome in 1600 were culture murdered by civilization.

The barbarian is /rrst and foremost

the man who believes in barbarism.
CLAUDE L.EVI-ST.RA.uss, Race and History
The Sign eiJ the Image

I say "horse" to my interlocutor. He does not understand. I try cheval,

Pferd, caballo. He still doesn't understand. I take a piece of paper and
write down these words. Nothing. As far as signs are concerned, I'm
out of ideas. So I draw a horse on my paper, and, to better explain,
with my mouth I make noises of whinnying and galloping. Since the
signs didn't work, I rely on images-both visual {drawing) and aural
(noises). Sign and image are the two great ways humans communi­
cate across space and time.
Images would at fi��eem to have a key advantage-universality­
over signs. If I draw a horse, I am understood by an incomparably
greater number of interlocutors than if I write or pronounce the word
"horse" in any language. This should have led long ago to a complete
suppression of signs by an irresistible invasion of images. In the fif­
ties, the school of the Canadian sociologist McLuhan thus predicted
the end of the "Gutenberg galaxy."
Let us note first of all that two of the three great religions of the
Western world-Judaism and Islam-reject and even condemn the
image. The second law of the Decalogue of the Old Testament forbade
painted or sculpted images for fear of the e'ver-threateningtemptation
to idolatry in those times. When Moses ascends Mount Sinai, God
hides from his view jimage) while giving him the Tables of the Law
(signs). But when he goes back down to his people, Moses finds them
adoring the Golden Calf (image). So he breaks the Tables of the Law.
It would not be giving a false idea of Christianity to describe it as a
rehabilitation of the image vis-a-vis the sign. When Jesus ascends
Mount Tabor, it is to show himself to his disciples·in all his divine
splendor (image). After they go back down into the valley, he forbids
them to breathe a word (sign) of what they have seen. Christian art
was the fruit of this revolution.
Sign and image are very closely linked in our society. Photography,
cinema, magazines, and television are above all images, it is true. But
these images would be unintelligible and uninteresting without the
signs-commentaries and words-that accompany them, Signs, how­
ever, are self-sufficient, as the book and the radio prove.
For the Muslim philosophers, sign is spirit, intelligence, an incite­
ment to search, to think. It is turned towards the future. Image, on
the contrary, is matter, a frozen relic of the past. And the sign has its
beauty. It is the beauty that bursts forth in calligraphy. In the ara­
besque, the infinite is deployed in the finite. 79

There is more truth in the ink of the wise man

than in the blood of the martyr.
WORDS ATTRIBUTED TO MUHAMMAD
Purity eiJ Innocence

The purity of a chemical body is a state absolutely against nature that

is only. obtained from procedures stemming from violence. Water is
the simplest case. What is pure water? It can be water which, boiled
or filtered, has been rid of the bacteria and the viruses that it con­
tained. This is biological purity. But if one is in search of chemi­
cal purity, it is better to proceed by successive distillations-water
boiled in a retort connected to a cooling tube-to eliminate the salts
and metal traces. The purity of the water thus treated is measured by
its ability to resist_,the conduction of an electric current, water being
a conductor only tftriks to the mineral salts it contains.
This "pure" water acts like a violent poison to living organisms.
When it is ingested by an organism, all the mineral salts carried by
the blood and the humors in fact rush toward it because it gives them
the possibility of being further diluted. This phenomenon is used to
rid diabetics of urea, uric acid, and other toxins concentrated in the
blood that their kidneys can no longer filter. Yet this dialysis, neces­
sary in these pathological cases, becomes catastrophic in individuals
with normal serous salt levels. A loss of calcium and potassium in
the blood would result, and this could lead to death. In effect, the
heart be?,ts thanks only to an electrical current maintained by a bal­
ance of calcium and potassium in the blood. The absorption of "pure"
water can also provoke gastric, intestinal, or cutaneous bleeding.
These physical misdeeds of purity are nothing compared to the
innumerable crimes that this obsessive idea has provoked through­
out history. Man, haunted by the demon of purity, sows death and
ruin around him. Religious purification, political purges, the attempt
to preserve racial purity, the desire to attain an anticamal, angelic
state: all these aberrations lead to countless massacres and misfor­
tunes. It must be remembered that fire-the Greek root of "pure"-is
the symbol of the stake, war, and hell.
The opposite of purity, innocence resembles it like its healthy in-
version. Animals, small children, and the mentally handicapped are
innocent. Evil has no hold on them. The reasonable adult man may
hold up as an ideal a prolonged and preserved state of childhood.
Innocence is spontaneous love of being, "yes" to life, smiling ac­
ceptance of celestial and terrestrial nourishment, ignorance of the
infernal purity/impurity alternative. Some saints, such as Francis of
Assisi, seem to live in this state, in which animal simplicity joins
hands with divine transparency. 81
But this is a quite improbable miracle. In Dostoyevski's novel The
Idiot (1868-1869)1 PrinceMychkin, devoured by a devastating feeling
of pity, is incapable of loving a woman, of resisting attacks from the
outside world, and finally, of living. He is struck down by epilepsy.

Albuquerque . . . finding himself in extreme peril at sea, li�ed a young

boy upon his shoulders for the sole purpose of joining their fates, so that
the boy's innocence would serve as a guarantee and recommendation
for the divine favor that would bring them both to safety.
MONTAIGNE, Essays
Chronology eiJ Meteorology

Jules Verne's most famous novel is without a doubt Around the World
in Eighty Days (1872). His hero is an Englishman, Phileas Fogg, a
bachelor obsessed with precision. "This man is a living clock," re­
marks in despair Passepaitout, the French manservant he has just
hired. In effect, Phileas Fogg's whole life is regulated to the minute
and must be carried out point by point with inexorable rigor.
Phileas Fogg's library is of course mostly composed of boat and rail
schedules. And from these schedules he deduces a priori that one can
go around the world in eighty days. But now he must do it, that is,
match the itinerary �Fc'ulated from his books with concrete experi­
ence. Now, this concrete experience is in fact composed of unpredict­
able leaps of meteorology. Fogg will have to go around the world, a
schedule in hand, "come hell or high water." Such is the bet he makes
with the members of his club for an enormous sum of money.
The subject of Jules Verne's novel is the collision of meteorology
and chronology. Phileas Fogg is the incarnation of chionology; as for
meteorology, it is personified by Passepaitout because he is the man
of improvisation and resourcefulness in ... "foggy" situations.1
Thus the novel rests on the ambiguity of the French word temps,
which signifies both time and weather. (Note that this ambiguity
exists neither in English nor in German, which also has two words
for temps, Zeit [time] and Wetter [weather].) The homonymy of
temps for time and weather is, however, largely justified inasmuch as
the seasons-which are characterized by meteorological portraits­
have a very precise place on the calendar. Everyone knows that
spring begins on 21 March just after midnight, summer 21 June, and
so forth. But the fact remains, of course, that there are sunny winters
and rainy summers.
Jules Verne's novel ends on a coup de theatre that makes this a most
profoundly philosophical fiction. According to his travel diary, Fogg
took eighty-one days to finish his trip around the world. He has thus
indisputably lost his bet and faces certain ruin. But Passepartout,
walking through the streets, notices that the stores are closed. It is not
Monday, as Fogg believed, but Sunday, and thus the bet is won. What
Fogg forgot was that, having circled the globe from west to east­
against the movement of the sun-he gained twenty-four hours. This
phenomenon, which we are totally incapable of comprehending, was
analyzed by the philosopher Kant in his theory of space-time as a
priori forms of sensibility, irreducible to any concepts of understand- 83
ing. This he expressed by a striking image: "If the whole world were
reduced to a single glove, it would still have to be a right glove or a left
glove, and this, intelligence alone will never understand."

0 rains! Wash in man's heart his most beautiful. words, his most beauti­
ful sayings, the most beautiful sequences, the best made sentences, the
best born pages.
SAINT-TOHN PERSE, Exile
The Primary eiJ the Secondary

The distinction between primary and seconda ry comes from charac­

terology, and to understand it one must forget the schoolish connota­
tion that sometimes adheres to it like a bad odor.
A secondary person lives in constant reference to his past and his
future. Nostalgia for what no longer is and fear of what is to come
overshadow his present and devalue his immediate sensation. His
intelligence is calculating rather than intuitive. His space is an echo
chamber and a labyrinth of perspectives. In love, faithfulness is more
important than freedo�,Jfe is constantly haunted by these three
ghosts: remorse, regret, and resentment. Francois Mauriac: "Some­
times I forgive, but I never forget."
The primary person glories in the youth of the eternal present. He
can be cerebral or sensual, but he is the man of seminal evidence and
of the first beginning, For him, each morning is the first day of cre­
ation. He is not worried about ghosts or chimeras. He is spontane­
ously ungrateful, lacking in foresight, but without rancor. By in­
stinct, he adheres to whatever offers itself.
There is nothing stranger than certain couples that history brings
together, uniting a primary and a secondary, who perpetually hesitate
between mutual admiration and disdain, love and hate. Such were, for
example, Voltaire-the-primary and Rousseau-the-secondary, who
quarrelled for years but died within weeks of each other, as if the one
could not live without the other. But Voltaire was the man of the
present, while Rousseau, writing his Confessions,· was at the same
time plunging into his own past and creating the founding work of
modern literature.
Some time later, French history was dominated by a comparable
couple: Talleyrand and Napoleon. The first letters from Talleyrand to
General Bonaparte during the latter's campaigns in Italy and Egypt
are, purely and simply, love letters. For the already mature and some­
what compromised diplomat, obstinately rooted in the ancien re-
gime-his famous exclamation, "[h]e who has not known the ancien
regime does not know how good life can be" is a second ary's profes­
sion of faith-this general of obscure origins, shining with youthful
genius, incarnates before his time a romantic hero of almost mytho­
logical dimensions.
Yet the seduction is reciprocal. In the eyes of the ambitious little
Corsican with the ridiculous accent and appe3l'ance, this representa-
tive of one of the oldest aristocratic families, perfectly familiar with 85
all the courts of Europe, is an ideal father, guide, and tutor, indispens-
able for the acquisition of power. Little by little, their relations deteri-
orate, but the grievances remain always between primary and second-
ary. For Napoleon, Talleyrand is, in his worst moments, a monster of
duplicity. ("You are shit in a silk stocking.") For Talleyrand, Napoleon
is nothing more than a vulgar and impulsive brute.
There was an exceptional flowering of primary genius at the end of
the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, in paint­
ing with impressionism, the school of the moment, without past or
future, and in the music of Claude Debussy. For its part, poetry man­
ifests over the century a magnificent primary lineage that can be
traced back to Theophile Gautier, continuing with the Parnassians,
Paul Valery, and Saint-John Perse.

Opinion of the "secondary" Saint-Simon on the "primary" Philip II,

Duke of Orleans (the Regent):
I shall not be afraid to say that he turned into vice the supreme virtue
o f forgiving one's enemies; his extravagance without cause nor choice
was too close to insensitivity. . . . A kin.d of insensitivity that made him
seem innocuous while he gave the most dangerous and most serious
offense; and, since the strength and principle of hate and friendship,
gratitude and vengeance is the same, and he lacked this spirit, the con­
sequences were both infinite and pernicious.
MEMO ms, chapter 390. Quoted by Alain in HUMANITIES
Poetry etJ Prose

One could imagine two adjacent stores, one an antique shop and the
other a hardware store. The window of the hardware store boasts
arrays of aluminum pots, shining with black Bakelite handles. As
elegant as these pots may look, it is clear that their sole aspiration is
to serve. Their raison d'�tre is the kitchen with all its harshness: the
fire, the sauces, the aggressions of cleaning. Useful objects_whose
only worth is their utility, they wear out and will soon be thrown
away and replaced;
The antique dealer also displays pots. But they are made of pure
copper, the surface defifately hand-hammered by an eighteenth­
century craftsman. They cannot go on the fire. They are useless.
They are ideas of pots more than they are true pots.
It is the same with words, depending on whether they are found in
a prose text or in a poem.
The raison d'etre of prose is its efficiency. Jean-Paul Sartre: "Prose
is in essence utilitarian; I would define the writer of prose as a man
who uses words. Monsieur Jourdain used prose to ask for his slippers,
Hitler to declare war on Poland." Let us add that neither one of them
doubted the efficiency of his words. Monsieur Jourdain knew that,
having spoken, he would receive his slippers; Hitler knew that his
divisions would indeed invade Poland. As soon as their effect was
obtained, these orders became null and void, and disappeared before
their own effectiveness. Like the hardware dealer's pots, prose rushes
forth towards its own destruction.
Quite different are poetry's words, always aspiring to eternity. Me­
ter and rhyme are justified by their mnemonic virtues. For the voca­
tion of verse is to be learned by heart and recited at any moment, for
'all eternity.
Paul Valery recounts this dialogue between the artist Degas and
the poet Mallarme. "I have so many ideas in my head," said Degas, "I
could write poetry too." And Mallarme answers: "But poetry, my
dear friend, is made with words, not with ideas." For it is prose that
begins with an idea. Monsieur Jourdain first has the idea to put on his
slippers, Hitler to invade Poland. Then they speak in accordance
with their ideas.
In poetry, the word is first. The poem is a chain of words linked by
sonority and a certain rhythm. The ideas they carry are second ary.
They follow as well as they can. To "understand" prose is to compre-
hend the ideas that govern it. To "understand" a poem is to be over- 87
come by the inspiration that it radiates. In poetry, clarity and preci­
sion-values of prose-yield to emotion and evocative force. The
result is that in prose one can always change the words-and in par-
ticular translate the text into another language-as long as the idea is
respected-while a poem is inexorably faithful to the words that com-
prise it, and cannot pass from one language into another. A poem and
its pretended translation into another language are but two poems on
the same theme.
One· could express the same idea by using the concepts of content
and form. One would say that in prose, content and form are easily
separated, the same content expressible in many ways, while in po­
etry the content/form distinction cannot be made: form serves also
as content, and content merges with a determined form.

One might be sUiprised that profound thoughts are found in the writings
of poets rather than philosophers. The reason for this is that poets write
with the enthusiasm and power of the imagination: we have in us some
seeds of science which, like flint, philosophers extract by means of rea­
son, while poets, using the imagination, cause the sparks to ignite and
burn with greater intensity.
RENE DESCARTES, Cogitationes privatae
Action eiJ Passion

For a long time, passion was considered a fault, a deficiency, the

sickness p_ar excellence of the soul. To understand this, all one has
to do is insert the word "passion" in the semantic family to which
it belongs, where one will find "passive," "pathological," and "pa­
thetic." Christ's Passion is simply the sum of the cruelty andtortures
that led to his death. For the Stoics (Zeno of Elea, Seneca, Epictetus,
Marcus Aurelius), passion is the absolute evil. Happiness exists only
in impassiveness.
Descartes wrote a Treatise of the Passions I 1649) in which he con­
siders will and reasonll:N'faculties of the soul that must judge, direct,
and if necessary, suppress passions-which come from the body. (It is
useful to remember that Descartes is the exact contemporary of Cor­
neille.) In his Treatise he distinguishes six primitive passions: admi­
ration, love, hate, desire, joy, and sadness. According to him, all the
other passions are either composed of or are types of these elemen­
tary passions. The passions are useful insofar as they strengthen and
help the soul maintain thoughts that are useful in themselves. They
are harmful insofar as they strengthen.and conserve these thoughts
more than is necessary. In sum, they can-like the body itself-either
serve or subjugate the soul.
Spinoza explained his system in a book that appeared after his
death, the title of which alone-Ethics-indicates its primordial
moral significance. Flowing from Descartes's doctrine, it is an abso­
lute rationalism, incomparably more radical.
Body and soul are two modes of the divine substance. They do not
influence one another but obey a strict parallelism, like one original
translated into two different languages. "The order and connection of
ideas are the same as the order and connection of things" (bk. 21
theorem 7). Individual beings-soul and body-are the accidents of
these modes. The ideas of the human mind have adequacy in God in
so far as God constitutes the essence of this mind. Ideas have inade-
quacy in the human mind when they have adequacy in God, not only
in so far as God contains the essence of this mind, but still more
because God contains at the same time the essences of other minds.
To the degree to which the mind has adequate ideas, it is active. It is
passive to the degree to which it has inadequate ideas. The mind has
passions in so far as it can be considered a part of nature that cannot
be perceived clearly and distinctly by itself, in abstraction from oth-
� �
One can credit the romantic revolution with integrating passion
and action, passion serving as action's internal motor: the romantics
affirm with Hegel that nothing great can be done without passion.
Here, the sense of history becomes critical. Before Hegel, philoso­
phers from Plato to Spinoza agreed that the events of history were
nothing but a bloody and unintelligible chaos, thus devoid of all
interest. Hegel, with his dialectics, was the first to attempt to pro­
vide history with an intelligible structure. He was aided in this task
by the contemporary spectacles of the French Revolution and the
Empire. (Remember that he was the exact contemporary of Napo­
leon, Chateaubriand, and Beethoven.) From this point of view, his
work is comparable to Beethoven's, which has been called the explo­
sion of the revolutionary tumult and the Empire's trumpets in the
music of Mozart.
For Hegel, Beethoven, and their contemporaries, the man who acts
under the reign of passion is marked by a historical force that over­
takes and aggrandizes him. It is the very definition of genius, a typ­
ically romantic ideal.

Were we mute and still as pebbles,

our very passivity would be an action.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, Being and Nothingness
The Sun ei) the Moon

The sun-rising, ascending, reaching its zenith, and then setting­

covers in a few hours the great phases of a brief and sumptuous life.
Yet this trajectory-which plays such a role in our daily lives-is but
appearance, because the "Copernican revolution" (1543) taught us
that it was the earth that turned while the sun remained still. Coper­
nicus could be considered a failure because we continue in spite of
him to see the sun rise and set, an obvious phenomenon that his
theory could not explain. There are thus specious appearances that
resist any refutation.
Although the moon moves in its way as much as the sun, we are
happy to ignore its trajectory_ We want to see it as immobile, It is true
that the sleep that occupies the brightest of our nights hardly leaves
us time to observe the movement of the moon.
There are moonless nights, which we paradoxically call the time of
the "new moon." But there is no day without sun. Even when the
clouds hide it, we know it is there because it is daytime.
The moon manifests its mysterious power by the tides. She pulls
toward her the enormous liquid blanket-and it is low tide-then she
lets it fall back-and it is high tide. The explanations that scientists
give of this phenomenon are so mixed up that it is obvious they do
not understand a thing about it. What's more, anytime anyone speaks
of the moon's influence on something, it means they do not under­
stand a thing about it. Thus people whose moods change constantly
are called "lunatics" in French. In the same way, certain pale spots on
rugs and carpets are referred to as II moon spots."
The sun, on the contrary, symbolizes reason, balance, architecture.
Thus Louis XIV wanted to be called the Sun King. The sun is ob­
viously masculine, the moon feminine, and it is a great aberration
of the German language to have it the other way around. Apollo the
sun god and Diana the moon goddess are not husband and wife, but
brother and sister. They refuse to copulate, each for a different rea-
son: the moon because of her virginal frigidity, the sun because of his
self-sufficient fullness.
"The moon is the sun of statues," wrote Jean Cocteau. He could
have more simply written that the moon is the statue of the sun. But
the goal of sunbathing, still fashionable despite the many warnings
of doctors, is to transform the body into its own statue of golden
bronze, a solar statue.
91
My own place in the sky, relative to the sun's, must not make the
dawn seem less beautiful to me.
The last lines of Andre Gide's Journals, written on 13 February 1951 1
six days before his death

Glory is the sun of the dead.

HONORE DE BALZAC, The Quest of the Absolute
Gray eiJ Colors

Modern physics has adopted without reservations Newton's theory

on the nature of light and colors. Light comes from the sun, a body
whose temperature approaches 6,000 degrees Celsius. It is "white
light."
Newton teaches that in a prism this light reveals its composition, a
set of wavelengths that make-from the shortest to the longest­
violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Beyond red, in­
frared rays are invisible but can produce heat. Below violet, ultra­
violet rays are also invisible but can expose photographic film.
Goethe never ceased¥guing against Newton's theory that all col­
ors were contained in colorless light and can be detected through
analysis. For Goethe, light is simple from the very beginning. To him
this is obvious, necessary, normal, almost moral. The idea of white
light resulting from a mixture of all colors horrifies him.
But then where do colors come from? They are a result of so many
attacks on light by the outside world. It is in crossing the "troubled
spaces" that light engenders them; these spaces can be the air of the
sky-producing blue; the water of the sea-creating a bluish green; or
the angles of a crystal prism-displaying a rainbow.
Thus, the seven colors are like the seven sorrows of light, or-on an
elementary level-like the seven capital sins that come to trouble the
originally pure and simple soul of the child.
This vision of Goethe's can be illustrated in the choice of color or
black and white that today's photographers have. Color film has of
course completely taken over the enormous market of amateur pho­
tography. However, this is tourist and family photography with no
creative ambitions at all, and for which color's purpose is nothing but
cosmetic.
By contrast, the great creators of photographic art-Cartier-Bres­
son, Kertesch, Lartigue, Weston, Brassai, Doisneau, and so forth­
strictly limit themselves to black and white. We must, however, stop
calling these photos black and white, because they are never black,
nor white. They are composed of a range of grays, from the lightest to
the darkest. They are an ashen monochrome, and herein lies their
finesse and depth.
For this gray image pres ents us reality in a pure state, as God molded
it in the world's first week. It lets us see the very substance of things.
One could even say this: the gray is closer to reality than the color
photo, because reality is gray. The world surrounding us is by itself 93
colorless. It is painters who lend it color, and if we believe we see
things in color, it's because we've seen too many galleries and art
exhibits. We've emerged from them forever wearing chromogenous
glasses.

A black, E white, I red, U green, 0 blue: vowels,

Someday I will speak of your latent births:
A, black hairy corset of bursting flies
That buzz around the cruel stenches,

Shadowy gulfs; E, candor of vapors and tents,

Spears ofproud gl.aciers, white kings, trembling umbels;
I, purple, coughed up blood, laughter of beautiful lips
In penitent anger or drunkenness;

U, cycles, divine vibrations of viridescent seas,

Peace of pastures sown with animals, peace of the lines
That alchemy prints on great wise foreheads;

0, supreme Trumpet of strange stridencies,

Silences crossed by Worlds and Angels:
-0 Omega, violet light of His Eyes!
ARTHUR RIMBAUD, "Vowels"
The Soul ev the Body

The soul is the vital, eternal, and immutable principle that lives in
the body. It is a religious notion that must not be confused with
spirit. Culture, memory, and imagination come from the spirit. They
can vary from one time period to another, from one situation to an­
other. A person who sleeps or who is drunk or insane defines himself
not by his soul but by the state of his spirit. The soul is a divine
radiance, prisoner of the body for a lifetime. Death is its liberation.
Such at least is the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Christian concept of
the relationship betwee�tl}e soul and the body. It underscores the
·'{"'!}"'�
material subjections imposed on the soul by the body: its location in
the here and now of space and time, its weakness, its aging, its needs,
its illnesses. The body must be nourished, dressed, cared for. And of
what demands, what sufferings is it not the seat!
According to another viewpoint-which flourished with the re­
search of the Renaissance anatomists-our body is an incomparable
object of study. It teaches us more than anything else about the laws
of nature because we live from within it. Its study cannot but fill us
with surprise and admiration. The sculpture of antiquity had cele­
brated its external beauty. Anatomy and physiology teach us what a
magnificently t;.:onstructed machine it is. Yes, it is vulnerable, but
that is due to its efficiency. To be able to function in the material
world, one must accept the risk of suffering. The soul should be
grateful to have at its disposal this instrument of precision, helping it
cope with concrete life, and on the day of its death it should mourn
its separation from such an admirable companion.
This is why the soul must treat its body carefully, taking care of it
as a horseman does his horse. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "The weaker
the body, the more orders it gives; the stronger the body, the more
obedient it is." This conception of the body-horse leads to its moral
rehabilitation. µistead of picturing an ethereal soul dragging like a
ball and chain a body driven by vulgar desires, we have the image of a
naive, good, and healthy body-similar to an animal-ridden by a
perverse, vicious, and suicidal soul. If the body becomes alcoholic or
addicted to tobacco or drugs, is not the soul responsible for these
flaws? When a virgin body first touches alcohol, tobacco, or drugs, its
immediate reflex is a healthy and violent rejection. The soul must
train the body to tolerate and enjoy these perversions.
This rehabilitation of the body finds its religious justification in
the Christian dogma of the "resurrection of the flesh," according to 95
which all the dead will come back to life at the end of the world with
a body that Saint Paul describes as" glorious" ( I Cor. I 5 ). Theologians
confer on this new body four essential attributes: brilliance, agility,
subtleness, and impassiveness.

Animula, vagula, blandula

Hospes comesque corporis
Quae nunc a bib is in loca
Pallidula, rigida, nudula
Nee, ut soles, dabis iocos.

Little soul, roving and tender,

The body's companion and guest,
Now you go down into places
Pale, wild, and naked
Where you will no longer enjoy your usual games.
EMPEROR HADRIAN
Quantity eiJ Quality

The concept of quantity covers the infinite set of numbersand as­

sumes that one can tell what 3 flowers, 3 horses, and 3 pieces of
candy have in common. The child arrives rather easily at this num­
ber 3-which is neither flower, nor horse, nor candy-thanks to the
gestures that create it. Count to 3 1 walk 3 steps, tap out 3 measures:
these are elementary acts that are neither flower, nor horse, nor
candy, but acts that produce the 3.
Nonetheless the 3 flowers, the 3 horses, and the 3 candies must be
fairly similar, fairly cl_,,�, but also distinct from one another in order
to make 3. The beads of the abacus-one of the very first words in the
dictionary-are ideal objects for counting. In short, the quality of the
counted object must be as inconspicuous as possible. The abacus bead
must be odorless and tasteless and unremarkable in color and form.
We see here the opposition between quality and quantity. We can
try, for example, to reduce space to quantity by measuring it. It then
becomes x meters, decameters, kilometers. But quality reappears if
we observe that x kilometers of gently sloping plain are not crossed
like x kilometers of steep, rocky slopes. Are they the same kilome­
ters? Everyone knows the old trick question: which is heavier, a kilo
of feathers or a kilo oflead? The weight is undoubtedly the same, but
if I must carry one or the other, the effort involved will be quite
different.
Faced with reality, measurement experiences other misadventures
as well. If I lower degree by degree the temperature of a liter of water, I
might believe that I am remaining within the framework of pure
quantitative measurement. That is, until I go past zero and my water
freezes. A purely quantitative progression seems to have caused a
qualitative revolution: the liquid has become solid, and a naive ob­
server might wonder if it is still the same body.
It is the same for the height of a man. If we add one, two, three
centimeters and so forth, the average man suddenly becomes a giant.
But at what point of added centimeters? Conversely, one could study
at what point of decrease in height a man who was simply short
becomes a dwarf.
We see that quantity masters quality poorly and sometimes suffers
cruel failures. And worse, quality is not immutable. It changes. This
is called alteration-a concept that Octave Hamelin defined as the
synthesis of quality and movement. It is a shame that the word "al-
teration" has a pejorative connotation. The fruit that ripens, the 97
wine that age_s, the child who learns to behave are all examples of
alterations.
Now, alteration is almost never measurable. In its movement,
quality escapes quantity. It becomes a case of subjective taste; indi­
vidual appreciation, undefinable intuition.

Undoubtedly quality is worth more than quantity,

but one can discuss quality forever;
· quantity, however, is unquestionable.
EDWARD REINROT
Left eiJ Right

The right hand [main droite) is normally more "adroit" than the left
hand [main_gauche], which is itself "gauche," that is, "maladroit."
This holds at least for the great majority of people, who are right­
handed. Traditionally, good is on the right side, evil on the left. For
example, on Calvary, the good thief was to Christ's right, the bad
thief to his left. At the Last Judgement, the chosen will be on the
right hand side of the Father, the damned on his left.
In 1789, from the very first meeting of the Estates General, the
royalists sat to the right of the president and the partisans of the
Revolution to his left. lf-l'fe result was a political tradition that en­
dures to this day.
What is the political right? What is the political left? The right is
conservative. It believes in traditional values and means to defend
them against troublemakers. The left believes in progress and wants
to promote it against an established order it considers unjust. The
right thinks that paradise is behind us, and each day that passes takes
us farther and farther away. The Revolution of 1789 was an irrevers­
ible catastrophe, but Louis XN, moving to Versailles in order to flee
Paris and its people, already proved that the rot had set in. One has to
go back to Saint Louis to find an untainted ideal. Since the passage of
time is inevitable and irreversible, there is a basic pessimism in the
spirit of the right. This pessimism reaches its height with certain
writers like Joseph de Maistre, Leon Eloy, or Louis-Ferdinand Celine,
who see in time's passing only its apocalyptic end.
The left believes, with Condorcet, that "the perfectibility of man is
unlimited." For him, humanity is slowly emerging from the shadows
of ignorance and ascends toward the light and toward tomorrows
that sing.
In the argument over the respective influence of heredity and en­
vironment on living creatures, the right stresses heredity, the left
environment. There too is an example, first, of the right's pessimism,
because heredity is ah irreversible stroke of fate, and second, of the
left's optimism, because the environment can more easily be im­
proved. When a nation is led by a totalitarian power, if it is right­
wing, it preaches racism and creates extermination camps to get rid
of the bad race. If it is left-wing, "reeducation" camps proliferate, and
these are every bit as deadly. Less radically, biology is more on the
right, sociology on the left.
Cerebral physiology distinguishes the right and left hemispheres, 99
but due to the intersection of sensory fibers in the rachidian bulb,
each hemisphere controls the opposite side of the organism. The
excellent right hand thus depends upon the left side of the brain.

When we entered the room, he was busy drawing his left hand with
bis right hand.
'What the devil are you doing there, Gericault!" asked the colonel.
"You can see, my dear sir," said the dying man. "I am using myself. My
right hand will never find as good an anatomical study as the one offered
by my left hand, and he is selfishly taking advantage of it."
In effect, Gericault had gotten so thin, that through the skin we could
see the bones and muscles of bis hand, like those plaster ecorches 1 stu­
dents use as models.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS, My Memoirs
Time etJ Space

Time and space are the two great dimensions of our experience. Time
is lived as duration with delight, impatience, or horror. It is the very
fabric of life-and it is not surprising that a vitalist philosophy such
as Henri Bergson's gives it a central position: "Wherever anything
lives, there is somewhere an open register upon which time is in­
scribed" (Creative Evolution, 1907).
Similarly, area is concretely perceived as a decor that can be ver­
tiginously empty or suffocatingly encumbered with objects, able to
be crossed with one juiwi;;--or completely inaccessible.
An effort of abstraction can then empty these two milieus of all
their contents, making them homogenous and infinite forms subject
to units of measure. For Kant, space and time are the two II a priori
forms" of sensibility. Although perfectly intelligible, they are not
reducible to concepts of understanding, as proven by, for example,
the notions of right and left, which are derived from sensibility alone.
Time, then, is distinguishable from space by its irreversibility
alone. Theoretically, a moving object in space can always come back
to its point of departure. Yet one cannot go back in time-except in a
fantastic novel such as HG. Wells's The Time Machine (1895). This
fiction consists simply of suppressing irreversibility and turning
time into just another space. One can then explore history as one can
venture into sub-Saharan Africa or the Amazon rain forest. Note that
this suppression of irreversibility is represented in a crudely formal
way by the hands of a clock-which return each day to their point of
departure, arriving at the equation 24 hours = o hours-and by the
eternal cycle of the months and seasons of the calendar. The essen­
tial point of Bergson's philosophy is a defense of irreversible duration,
concretely lived, against its reduction to the abstract time of physics,
which is nothing but a disguised space.
In a vision-more poetic than philosophical-Friedrich Nietzsche
proclaimed the principle of eternal recurrence. It is one of the dogmas
of Thus Spoke Zarathustra 11883), along with the death of God and
the enthusiastic "yes" to life and destiny lamor fati). The idea is that
the passage of time possesses two faces, one weeping-humanity's
race towards self-destruction through bloody tribulations-and one
laughing-the peaceful and familiar cycle of the seasons and the
stars. The idea of an eternal recurrence of human history erases this
opposition and confers on historical events a necessary and serene
character that makes us forget their atrociousness. IOI
Octave Hamelin proposed that movement was born of the synthe­
sis of time and space. One can propose the reverse: assume the pri­
macy of movement, which is then broken down into space and time.
That is probably what Maurice Maeterlinck meant by the following
sentence:

If the stars were irmriobile,

time and space would no longer exi.st.
MAURICE MAETERLINCK, The Supreme Law
Surface etJ Depth

There is such a thing as a geometry of morals. A thought can be lofty

or low, deep_ or superficial. We understand immediately that lofty and
deep thoughts are good thoughts while low and superficial thoughts
are bad. We notice, however, from a purely spatial point of view, the
indisputable affinity between deep thoughts and low thoughts. As
soon as we descend below sea level-considered to be the measure of
altitude zero-are we displaying depth or baseness? As for "lofty"
thoughts, one can dismiss them as idealistic, unrealistic, too sum­
mary or superficial, and so forth. In a word, moral criteria founded on
spatial considerations �xtremely fragile.
This is not the case with philosophical and scientific thought. Ever
since Plato, philosophers have denounced the incertitude that sullies
the world of appearances. Sensory-especially optical-illusions
make us suspicious of immediate sensory impressions and inspire us
to look for a more solid reality below the phantasmagoria of appear­
ances. This method is illustrated by Plato's famous "myth of the
cave" (Republic bk. 7). Humanity, he tells us, resembles prisoners
chained together in a cave, heads turned towards the back of the cave.
Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners, people
pass, carrying objects whose shadows are projected on the rear wall of
the cave. The prisoners, of course, seeing nothing more than these -
shadows, take the shadows for reality. Only the person who has the
strength to turn around will know that they are but appearance. This
is the "metaphysician," the one who sees beyond (meta) the physical.
Modern physics and chemistry share this distinction between sub-
jective phantasmagoria and the deep reality underlying them that
only intelligence can reconstruct. Plato and, after him, Kant, called
this hidden and intelligible world "noumena" (in contrast to the
world of "phenomena"). The atom, its core and particles, neutrons,
electrons, and so forth, are noumena hiding under the illusory shim­
mer of our c6ncrete surroundings. Colors are defined by their wave-
lengths, from violet (0.4 microns) to red jo.8 microns). Heat is but a
particular form of energy, and so forth.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, certain philosophers
reacted against this scientific bias that rejected all concrete life as
illusory. While Henri Bergson was busy saving what is "immediately
given in consciousness" and carefully describing the comic workings
of the circus and theater, Edmund Husserl and, after him, Jean-Paul
Sartre, were defining "phenomenology" as a method designed to ro3
grasp the essences in immediate appearances.

That which is deepest in man is the skin.

The truth is naked, but underneath the nude

there is the ecorche.
PAUL VALERY, Mauvaises Pensees et autres
Act eiJ Potency

We owe the concepts of act (energeia) and potency (dynamisJ to Aris­

totle as he defines them in his Metaphysics. This opposition is illus­
trated by examples that are as numerous as they are easy to under­
stand-too numerous and too easy, perhaps, for the opposition seems
on the whole to lack consistency. The alert and the sleeping man, the
one who sees and the one whose eyes are closed, the statue and the
shapeless mass of bronze, the fruit in contrast to the flower, the
blooming flower compared to the bud, and so forth; so many illustra­
tions of what is act an_d what is potency.
Plato opposed the lifgher world of Ideas-eternal, permanent, per-
fectly defined-to the chaotic melee of the world perceived by the
senses. Aristotle brought ideas back to earth. But they must not dis­
integrate in the flood of movement and becoming that dominates the
world as perceived by the senses. How can the unity that persists
between the old man and the child he once was be preserved? He is
the same individual, but ... he has changed, that is all. How can
sameness be found in change? By the potency that is the phantom
presence of the future in the present. The child was already a poten­
tial old man. Year by year, his potential was taking action.
Aristotle's theory was a great success in ancient Greece and Rome,
and also in the Middle Ages. Leibniz proposed a variation on it: the
infinite division of monads allows a perpetual evolution that does
not shatter the unity of each monad's essence.
We call sovereign states "powers." Each state is, in fact, potentially
able at any moment to "take action" through diplomatic, economic,
or military means. And its weight relative to the other states depends
on this perpetual threat.
The opposition between sexual potency (or impotency) and the sex
act itself dominates the erotic life of the couple. For sexual impo­
tency generally consists in the precocity of the sex act. Sexual po-
tency involves prolonging the erection and postponing ejaculation at
will. It is the act promised, suspended, wrapped up, held back. Such is
the self-denial of the good lover.

Many substances have already achieved great perfection; however, be­

cause the continuous is infinitely divisible, there always subsist in the
abyss of things slumbering parts which must be wakened and attracted
towards the more, the better, and, I would say, a higher culture. And
105
consequently, progress will never be fully achieved.
LEIBNIZ, On the Radical Origin of Things
Genera eiJ Differences

Classical logic teaches us that a definition is normally made up of the

immediate· genus and the specific dilference. For example, if I say
that "man is a rational animal," I begin by classifying him in the most
immediate genus, animals. He is in the company of the giraffe, the
snail, and the flea. In order to distinguish him from these neighbors, I
add his specific difference. He is rational, which the giraffe, the snail,
and the flea are not.
This definition of the definition is priceless because it is important
that each thing and ea��erson have a genus and a dilference. Take
for example all the deputies to the National Assembly. Each one
represents indistinctly France in its entirety. But at the same time
each comes from a province, often from a city of which he is mayor,
and it frequently happens that there is a conflict between national
interest {genus) and local interest (difference).
It is still more interesting to use this grid to decipher literary
works. One can say that a work is all the stronger if its specific
differences reinforce-instead of destroying-its immediate genus. In
effect, some works accentuate their dilferences to absurdity and lose
everything when read from the angle of universality. For if it is good
to be origina,l, it is bad to be eccentric. That is the case with most
"regional" authors. To take delight in them, one has to be from the
same province. They are "our local" writers, who exude the modest
wine and accent of the region; but we must consume them there
because, just like the local wine, they do not travel well.
A work can sink into its differences because of its language. Cer­
tain dialectical expressions, a particular vocabulary-neither opaque
nor transparent, but beautifully translucent-lend it an incompa­
rable savor. But at the same time, its circle of readers is limited,
and, in particular, it fails the test of translation. This is why Hemi
Pourrat, Henri Vincenot, and Pierre Jakez Helias from, respectively,
Auvergne, Burgundy, and Brittany do not have the international rep-
utation we would like. It is even more true in other countries, such as
Germany, where authors as important as Theodor Storm or Theodor
Fontane discourage the foreign reader because of the provincialisms
that stop him at every page.
And then there is the other side: broad, open, and generous minds
who speak to all humanity. Tolstoy comes first to mind: the man of
genus par excellence who stands in marked contrast to Dostoyevski,
the man of most extreme differences. For Tolstoy too there is a dan- 107
ger; and Gide, who preferred Dostoyevski to him, compared him to
the historical painter Edouard Detaille, as much for the scope of his
vision as for the frozen flatness of his studio light.
More serious is the case of Romain Rolland, inventor of the roman­
fleuve, which rolls towards an enormous estuary of limpid but cold
and insipid waters. He claimed to be the disciple of Spinoza, Goethe,
and Tolstoy. When the First World War broke out, he had the courage
to say "no" to the national hysteria that had been unleashed on both
sides of the Rhine, and for him the Russian Revolution of 1917 rang
out like the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth. Today, all this
seems touchingly naive.
Nevertheless, numerous writers have overcome-and even, it
seems, profited from-the genus/difference opposition. No one
would doubt that T homas Mann is a German writer, among the most
German of German writers. This difference was dangerous and was
almost his undoing when,.. in 1914, he was gripped by the intoxica­
tion of nationalism and began brandishing the banner of Germanic
superiority. He was on his way to becoming a sort of Prussian Barres
when he was quite brutally cured of this blindness by the arrival of
Nazism. Exile and the Second World War completed his metamor­
phosis. Doctor Faustus, written in the United States during the war,
remains the most German of the German novels from this period,
but the breadth of its horizon is admirable. This solution could be
called differences shattered.
Albert Cohen is another example one could cite. Doubtless, a part
of his work is diminished by its bitter faithfulness to h�s Mediterra­
nean roots. Yet he has sometimes managed to happily integrate his
"differences" with a feeling of universal scope, and this fusion of two
opposite inspirations give a result incomparable for its strength and
savor. In My Mother's Book, he describes his mother, in a sometimes
 cruel and insistent manner, as a modest but narrow-minded woman
whose hundreds of ridiculous gaffes betray her Judeo-Eastem origins.
But at the same time, she is an absolutely pure incarnation of mater­
nal self-denial. By that, she represents all humanity at its most sensi­
tive and most disinterested. This solution could be called differences
sublimated.

In order to grasp differences, one must cool the head and slow down the
I08
movement of thought. In order to notice analogies, one must warm the
head and speed up the movement of thought.
MARIE JEAN HERAULT DE SECHELLES, Theorie de l'ambition
The Given eiJ the Constructed

In cards, it is chance that gives each player the cards-ace, king,

queen, jack, and so forth-he will have to play the hand. From then
on, it's up to him-his intelligence, experience, technique-to play
his best possible game. Such a particular and derisory case as a hand
of belote or bridge symbolizes to perfection what makes up the given
and the constructed in life. The given consists in our hereditary
genes, our physical makeup, our dispositions. But it is also the milieu
into which we were born, where we grew up-which we have not
chosen any more than the color of our eyes.
Such are the "cards" that fate deals us in the beginning. But very
quickly the hand begins, and it is up to us-I mean to our free will-to
play. It is then necessary to "construct" our life. First, our culture­
whose main works are finished by the age of twenty, and although we
can still hang wallpaper and put flowerpots in the windows, the most
important building is over and done with. Second, our apprentice­
ship-for ever since our first emotions, we have tested "the other"
and determined the one-or ones-we want at all cost and those we
do not want at any price. Finally, our livelihood-for we have to live
and do something in life. And all that forms a construction, brilliant
or disastrous, some parts beautiful, some shabby.
It seems that life is made of periods, each playing its role in this
construction, and certain delays can cause irreversible harm. It is well
known that the child who has not learned to talk by a certain age will
never master the ability to express himself, no matter how hard he
might try. Other less obvious failings can also have repercussions over
a whole lifetime. For example, the child who, for one reason or an­
other, has not been to school and has therefore' not learned about
community life will perhaps never be able to remedy this inadequacy.
What is given to each man at birth is totally unfair. There are the
poor and the rich, the big and the small, the beautiful and the ugly.
But being given too much discourages and prevents constructive ac-
 tivity. Identical twins remain unmarried more than other people be-
cause nature gave them an ideal companion from the cradle on. An
acquired fortune is worth more than an inherited fortune, and the
pathetic fate of some children of billionaires is well known.

The gods shower kindness

on men whose downfall they seek.
ANCIENT PROVERB
IIO
Idealism eiJ Realism

Idealism/realism. I am not speaking of psychology, nor of literary

movements. I am not thinking of contrasting Lamartine and Flaubert.
I am speaking of two possible solutions to the problem of knowledge.
The fundamental question consists in asking oneself where one
places rationality. According to the realists' point of view, rationality
is found in nature. Things are fundamentally rational. Man, on the
contrary, is influenced by irrational fantasies, passions, terrors, and
dreams. The entire history of science is man learning reason, thanks
exclusively to his observation of nature. Here nature plays the role of
the infallibly wise educator of the poor fool that is man.
Scientists are quite spontaneously realists-so spontaneously so
that they don't even know it-this word not being a part of their
vocabulary. This thoughtlessness is dangerous and can cause them
painful awakenings or adventurous episodes of sleepwalking. If one
believes in a theory-of knowledge or anything else-better that it be
deliberately and fully conscious.
In contrast, idealism places rationality in the human mind. It con­
siders nature to be an amorphous mass furnishing the mind material
it draws upon to construct the various sciences. For the idealist, the
"objective raw fact" appears as an opaque obstacle, more or less diffi­
cult to reduce, but which must be assimilated if science is to con­
tinue to develop. The scientific fact is not what science is made of,
but what science makes in making itself.
The idealist refuses any idea of progress and condemns the naive
ignorance of scientists who are convinced that their knowledge is the
best in all human history solely because it is the most recent. The
various human societies that existed across time and space-whether
it be Pharaonic Egypt or the United States of Franklin Roosevelt­
constitute coherent and rigid systems in which one can distinguish a
political system,· a religion, an economy, a medicine, an astronomy, a
physics, a poetry, a music, a theater, and so forth, like so many inter-
 dependent organs. None of these structures can be suppressed or _
replaced. When our doctors or our astronomers proclaim that their
medical knowledge or their astronomy is better or truer than that of
Louis XIV's time, they are simply expressing their affiliation with the
end of the twentieth century.

Esse est percipi.

To be is to be perceived.
112
GEORGE BERKELEY, An Essay Towards
a New Theory of Vision
A Priori eiJ A Posteriori

I have to write something, but I can't find my pen. Where is it? What
did I do with it?
Two methods of searching are possible. The first consists in clos­
ing my eyes, trying to remember, and thinking. When and where was
the last time I used my pen? What did I do after that? The second
method consists in getting up and just looking everywhere instead of
racking my brains. I look in my pockets, desk, briefcase, and so forth.
The first approach is a priori, the second a posteriori. Note how­
ever that the distinction is not absolute. When I've deduced that my
pen must be in the left inside pocket of my leather jacket, a doubt
remains, and an a posteriori verification can refute my conclusion.
Conversely, my a posteriori searches in all the nooks and crannies
where my pen might be are guided by a vague idea (a priori) that
obviously excludes certain investigations. I'm sure that there is no
chance my pen is hiding in the cellar or in the attic.
Scientific research is a perpetual to-and-fro movement between a
priori reasoning and a posteriori experimentation. Claude Bernard's
· Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865) gives
many examples in the field of physiology. Yet it is astronomy, going
back and forth between the telescope fa posteriori) and the chalk­
board fa priori), that best illustrates this alternation. In 1682, the
English astronomer Edmund Halley observed the passing of the
comet that now bears his name and calculated that it would reappear
toward the end of 1758. He would die in 1742. Sixteen years later, the
comet kept its appointment, appearing in the telescopes of Halley's
successors and assuring him a well-deserved fame.
It is not just in the field of science that these two paths are open.
The photographic creation, for example, also includes a priori and a
posteriori approaches. There are a posteriori photographers such as
Hemi Cartier-Bresson or Edouard Boubat. They wander through city
and countryside, camera in hand, not knowing ahead of time what
 the freedom and randomness of life will offer them. But it is evident
that the randomness is not total because they always run across peo­
ple and scenes that resemble their work and seem already to bear
their signature.
Other photographers such as Helmut Newton or Richard Avedon
proceed in an a priori manner. They imagine ahead of time the image
they want to make, and all the work consists in reconstituting in the
r 14 studio this image they dream about. These are mostly fashion and
advertising_photographers.
These notions of a priori and a posteriori are fundamental for cer­
tain philosophers. Kant's theory of knowledge depends on highlight­
ing the a priori conditions of knowledge, that is, the conditions found
not in the known object but in the knowing subject. Kant calls these
a priori conditions of knowledge transcendental. Since space is one
of the transcendental conditions of our perception, geometry, albeit
dependant on this perception, is an a priori science.
Plato's theory of kndMi·dge is the height of "a-priorism." Accord­
ing to this theory, the soul is immortal and has lived in the heaven of
pure ideas. It was then exiled to the mixed and shadowy lower world
that is ours. Therefore all research consists in separating from experi­
ence the memory of lost ideas. All true knowledge is recollection.

The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many
times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in
the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she
should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about
virtue, and about everything; for as all nature is akin, and the soul has
learned all things, there is no difffoulty in her eliciting or as men say
learning, out of a single recollection all the rest, if a man is strenuous
and does not faint; for all enquiry and learning is but recollection.
PLATO, Meno 81 1
The Absolute eiJ the Relative

The absolute is that which is separate, without relation or compari­

son to anything else. It is, in one sense, the biggest, the highest, the
rarest. Yet it also includes the simplest things we know. For the raw
data of everyday life-ambient temperature, colors, even inner sensa­
tions like hunger or fatigue-all this is given us as absolute, a sort of
raw material that we habitually ignore but that can also, if we wish,
become a subject of study.
And it is as a result of tliis study that the relative appears. Consider
for example the temperature of the air that surrounds me right now.
If I like, I can measure it with a thermometer. As soon as I do this, the
absolute data will become caught in the net of an intelligible system.
The measured temperature can be compared to a multitude of other
temperatures-of the night, the outside, the seasonal mean, and so
forth. The relative is thus the common product and normal end of
the activity of intelligence. Intelligence is the faculty that relativizes
the raw absolutes that experience delivers.
Thinkers of every age have sought to go beyond this net of relations
woven by intelligence. After raw experience and the scientific study
that followed, they turned to a third method of knowledge that
would lead them directly to the source of all light. It is mystical
intuition that combines the immediacy of raw experience and the
transmissibility of scientific knowledge. The mystical experience
originates in faith lived as the assurance of God's presence. On the
one hand, this presence can wane, fade away, abandoning the believer
in the"dark night." It can, on the other hand, intensify, plunging the
mystic into an abyss of light.
Mystical experience has something in common with relational
scientific knowledge: both are communicable and give rise to a com­
munity-disciples, brothers, or simply coreligionists-who share the
same belief. There are no lonely mystics.
 The absolute hides its existence and moves behind the world's tapestry.
It is unseen, revealing itself by an absence that is more. active than all
presences, like the master of the house who does not attend his own
dinner party.
JEAN GRENIER, Apropos de l'humain

u6
 The Spring eiJ the Bush

Yahweh's condemnation is quite clear and irrevocable: Moses, after

guiding the Hebrews for forty years through the desert toward the
Promised Land of Canaan, will die on Mount Nebo, in sight of this
land on which he will never set foot.
Andre Chouraqui, in his monumental book on Moses, i proclaims
his surprise: "For centuries, rabbis have peen wondering about this
mysterious decision: How could the finest son of Israel, the greatest
of prophets, the only herald of the Torah in the dramas of the Burning
Bush and the Sinai, be treated like this by the divine master of all
justice?"
The traditional explanation of Moses's disgrace seems so ridicu­
lous that one is tempted to ignore it. However, it must be considered,
because it contains the key to the problem.
Once again the Hebrews revolt against Moses, because they are
suffering from a lack of water: "And wherefore have ye made us to
come up out of Egypt, to bring us in unto this evil place? it is no place
of seed, or of figs, or of vines, or of pomegranates; neither is there any
water to drink." Moses turns to Yahweh, who says to him: "Take the
rod, ... and speak ye unto the rock before their eyes; and it shall give
forth his water, and thou shalt bring forth to them water out of the
rock: so thou shalt give the congregation and their beasts drink."
Moses gathers the people together and climbs on top of the rock. He
. strikes it twice with his rod, and water springs forth. Then Yahweh
says to Moses and Aaron: "Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me
in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this
congregation into the land which I have given them" (Nm. 20:4-12).
For the scholastic tradition, it was this second blow to the rock
that betrayed Moses's lack of confidence in the power and word of
Yahweh, who then unleashed his divine wrath.
What must be preserved in this interpretation is the role of the
miraculous spring in Moses's disgrace. Remember that Moses means
 "saved from the waters" and that the prophet never ceased having
dramatic encounters with the liquid element. His mission began
when the burning bush appeared on Mount Horeb, the mountain of
God. God speaks to him out of the midst of the bush, and orders him
to free the Hebrews, who were slaves of the Egyptians.
From that moment on, there is a constant and fundamental opposi­
tion between the bush and the spring. Moses must choose. The
u8 spring can but snuff out the burning bush. Yet the spring represents
human life; the lives of women, children, animals, and fields. Moses
will be torn between these two terms. When the Hebrews arrive in
the Sinai desert, Yahweh says to them: "Ye have seen what I did unto
the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings, and brought you
unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and
keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above
all people: for all the earth is mine. And ye shall be to me a priestly
kingdom, and a holy nation" (Ex. 19:4-6).
There was, however, a diamatic misunderstanding here, for the
Hebrews were not at all inclined to become a nation of holy an­
chorites and settle in the desert, God's country. They dieamed of a
"promised land flowing with milk and honey." Between the spring
from which flowed this milk and this honey and the burning bush,
there is all the distance that separates the profane and the sacred.
Yahweh seems ignorant of the fact that the Hebrews have little voca­
tion for the holiness he promises them. Caught between the Hebrews
and Yahweh, Moses finds himself constantly divided by this contra­
diction. Yahweh and Moses are acting out a play of love. Yahweh
loves Moses and is exasperated by these stories about springs, milk,
and honey. After forty years of tergiversation-eleven days on foot
would have sufficed to get from Egypt to Canaan-Yahweh allows the
Hebrews to get to the promised land. He will, however, keep Moses
with him. On Mount Nebo, within sight of the promised land, he
kills Moses with a kiss from his mouth, and buries him himself: "No
man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day" (Dt. 34:6).
One would not give a false idea of the opposition between the Old
and New Testament by saying that the Christian revolution con­
sisted in choosing the spring over the bush. Moses received the pro­
phetic anointment froni the burning bush. Jesus spent forty days in
the desert, but he only met Satan and his temptations. He begins his
ministry with his baptism in the Jordan. From then on, springs, foun­
tains, and wells will always mark his way.

Then cometh he to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near to

the parcel ofground that facob gave to his son foseph. Now facob's well
was there. fesus therefore, being wearied with his ;ourney, sat thus on
the well: and it was about the sixth hour. There cometh a woman of
Samaria to draw water: fesus saith unto her, "Give me to mi.nk" (for his
n9
disciples were gone away unto the city to buy meat).
Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, "How is it that thou,
being a few, askest mink of me, which am a woman of Samaria! For the
fews have no deali.ngs with the Samaritans."
fesus answered and said unto her, "If thou knewest the gift of God,
and who it is that saith to thee, 'Give me to drink,' thou wouldest have
asked of him, and he would have given thee livi.ng water."
The woman saith unto him, "Sir, thou hast nothing to maw with, and
the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water! Art thou
greater than our father facob, which gave us the well, and mank thereof
himself, and his chilmen, and his cattle!"
fesus answered, and said unto her, "Whosoever drinketh of this water
shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give
him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him
a well of water spri.nging up i.nto everlasting life."
JOHN 4:5-14
The Devil eiJ God

The Supreme Being, infinitely powerful, good, wise, creator and mas­
ter of all things, can be known by human beings in two ways: faith
and theology. Faith is simply the sovereign presence a believer feels
at his side, a feeling that keeps him from knowing solitude. This
presence is sufficient to fill the mystic's life, which thus has only the
appearance of confinement. Yet it can fade away, and the mystic, cast
into the II dark night, 11 undergoes a trial of II dereliction."
Theology is the intelligent and rational knowledge of God. It cul­
minates in the "ontological argument" of St. Anselm, the greatest
theologian. This intellt!t'i� proof of God's existence is formulated in
the following way: of all ideas, only that of God includes the attribute
of existence, because it is the most perfect idea. If it did not include
this attribute, it would immediately have to be rejected and replaced
by another that did.
Leibniz proposed a version of the ontological argument in har­
mony with his philosophy. According to him, ideas rush toward exis­
tence as a function of their degree of perfection. They come to exist
only if they are compatible with the more perfect ideas already real­
ized. The idea of God, that most perfect of all ideas, is the first one
realized and thus does not have to satisfy this condition of com­
patibility. Therefore if there is an idea of God, God exists.
The more perfect God has made creatures, the more freedom they
enjoy. This is why animals are incapable of sinning. At creation's
other pole, Lucifer, the Bearer of Light, the most perfect creature, was
to succumb to pride and claim to be the equal of God. He presides
over the kingdom of hell (which must not be confused with the un­
derworld of Greco-Latin antiquity), and, as the Devil, haunts the
destiny of humanity. The Middle Ages bequeathed us a hideous, re­
pugnant image of the Devil. It is only with John Milton's Paradise
Lost (1667) that Satan recaptures the dark beauty of a vanquished
hero. Lord Byron and Charles Baudelaire will in turn adorn him with
the prestige of skeptical intelligence and bitter lucidity. The Devil is
an important player in twentieth-century French literature. He ap­
pears in the works of Leon Bloy, Paul Claude!, Paul Valery, Fran�ois
Mauriac, Jean-Paul Sartre, and so forth, incarnating the negative in a
lively, efficient, dramatic and, one might say, positive manner.

I am the spirit that always denies!

And rightly so; for everything that comes to be
121
Deserves to perish.
It were therefore better 1f nothing came to be.
Thus everything that you call sin,
Destruction, evil, in short,
Is my own element.
GOETHE, Faust
Being eiJ Nothingness

The first picture that comes to mind when one thinks of Being and
Nothingness is a full ball suspended in infinite emptiness: for exam­
ple, the Earth moving along in interstellar space. This is the way, in
effect, that certain pre-Socratic texts present Being to us. According
to Parmenides of Elea, Being is "inflated like a perfectly round ball."
It is one, eternal, incorruptible. How then do we reconcile this tran­
scendent Being with earthly and human life? According to Aristotle,
Parmenides had developed a theory of cold and heat: cold emanated,
he said, from Nothingn�,-and heat from Being.
The classic opposite of Parmenides is Heraclitus of Ephesus, for
whom all is flux, transformation, the clash of opposites. He took fire
to be the fust principle of all things. His famous proposition is that
one never bathes in the same river twice. He is the father of dialectics,
the art of developing thought by means of a contradictory dialogue.
In the game of Being and Nothingness, one can state that the Being
of Heraclitus is eaten away by Nothingness like a piece of fruit by a
host of worms. At the other end of the history of philosophy, Jean­
Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger contrast Being and Nothingness in
a comparable manner. Both adhere to Husserl's phenomenology,
which gives a -metaphysical significance even to the most everyday
experiences. Heidegger then conducts analyses of idle talk, curiosity,
ambiguity, care, and so forth. In all human situations, there is a pres­
ence of absence, that is, an obsession with Nothingness. Man is the
only being in creation who is consciously aware of the certainty of
his own death.
For Jean-Paul Sartre, Parmenidean Being-which he calls the "in­
itself"-is "nihilated," in other words, is affected at times by a noth­
ingness from which arise movement, desire, consciousness (the 11for­
itself11 ). This consciousness is always in danger of getting stuck in the
viscosity of Being, provoking the feeling of nausea at the center of
Sartre's novel (Nausea, 1938). So whereas, for Heidegger anxiety ac-
companies the revelation of Nothingness, for Sartre nausea signals
the ominous return of Being. Nausea is not a subjective, individual
feeling; it is a mode inseparable from Being. "His blue cotton shirt
stands out joyfully against a chocolate-colored wall. That too brings
on Nausea. Or rather, it is Nausea. Nausea is not inside me: I feel it
over there on the wall, on the suspenders, all around me. It is one
with the cafe: I am inside it. On my right, the warm packet begins to
rustle, it waves its pairs of arms." 123

The For-itself appears like a tiny nihilation

that originates within Being; this is sufficient to totally
disrupt the In-itself. This disruption is the world.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, Being and Nothingness
Notes

Translator's Preface
1 The original French edition of Le Miroir des idees (Paris: Mercure de France,
1994) contains fifty-four essays. Tournier subsequently wrote four more for the
Folio edition of 1996: "The Bath and the Shower," "History and Geography,"
"Gray and Colors," and "The Spring and the Bush."
2 Eleazar, ou la source et le buisson !Palis: Gallimard, 1996).
3 Benjamin Ivry, "A Writer's Rages," Newsweek [International Edition) 6 No­
vember 1989: 60. In a conversation with the translator (26 July 1993), Tournier
stated that the journalist had misstated his views. It is true that he feels a
physical or "visceral repulsion" against abortion, but he is not opposed to it for
any political or moral reasons.
4 Le Vent Paraclet (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 1977), 189. All quotations from Tour­
nier's and other works in French will be my translations, unless otherwise
indicated.
Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 1967, 1972), 87.
6 Le Roi des Aulnes (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 1970), 74.
7 Les Meteores (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 1975), 285.
8 Stephane Mallarme, "Herodiade," Poesies (Paris: Gallimard-Poesie, 1945 ), 5 r.
9 Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles, 1969 (Paris:
Robert Laffont et Jupiter, 1982), 635-36.
10 Gerard Genette, Palimpsestes: la litterature au second degre jParis: Seuil,
1982), 447,425.
1 r Floyd Merrell, Semiosis in tbe Postmodern Age (West Lafayette rn: Purdue
University Press, 1995), 19.
12 Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard, La Conditionpostmodeme (Paris: Minuit, 1979), 7-8.
13 Jacques Derrida, "La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences
humaines," L'Ecriture etla difference !Paris: Seuil, 1967), 412.
14 See the following essays in The Mirror of Ideas for references to Nietzsche:
"Apollo and Dionysus," "The Beautiful and tlre Sublime," "Time and Space,"
"History and Geography." For a succinct discussion of Nietzsche's influence on
intellectuals after 1960, see Madan Sarup's An Introductory Guide to Post­
structuralism and Post.modernism (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1989).
15 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, 1878,
trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 203.
Translation slightly altered.
 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883, The Portable Nietzsche,
selected and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968) r23, 153, 2r9-
21.
17 Gilbert Durand, Figures mytbiques et visages de l'amvre: De la mythocritique
a la mythanalyse, 1979 !Paris: Dunod, 1992), 274.
18 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 18 72, trans. Shaun Whiteside (New
York: Penguin, 1993), 6-7.
r9 Le Crepuscule des masques !Paris: Hoebeke, r992), 182-83.
126 20 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking!, 1954, trans. Fred D. Wick and J.
Glenn Gray {New York: Harper, 1968), 46.

Man and Woman

r The text contains many quotations, some from French sources, some from
other languages: English, German, Greek, Latin, and so on. Unless otherwise
indicated, translations are my own. For extended or particularly difficult quo­
tations I have used standard English translations, appropriately footnoted.
'Irans.

�.,
The Child and the Adolescent
1 The translation of Baudelaire used is that of James McGowan in The Flowers of
Evil !Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) 2II. 'lrans.

The Cat and the Dog

1 Tournier explains the characterological concepts of "primary" and "secondary"
personalities later in this essay (see "The Pri mary and the Secondary"). He first
discussed these opposites in "Cinq clefs pour Andre Gide" ("Five keys for An­
dre Gide") in Le Vol du vampire (The flight of the vampire) (Paris: Mercure de
France,.1981) 2r8-44. The primary is spontaneous, living for the present; the
secondary occupies himself with thoughts of the past !nostalgia) or the future
(apprehension). Gide is a primary, as are Voltaire, Napoleon, and Valery. Rous­
seau, Talleyrand, Baudelaire, and Proust are examples of secondary person­
alities. Trans.

Hunting and Fishing

1 Rue du Chat-qui-peche, in the Latin Quarter. 'Irans.

The Willow and the Alder

1 The translation used is that of E. A. Bowring et al., The Poems of Goethe (New
York: John D. Williams, 1882.) 99. TI-ans.

Pierrot and Harlequin

1 The humor in these lines depends on a play of words, difficult to render satis­
factorily in English, between "the one" ll'une) and "moon" llune). 'Irans.
 Nomad and Sedentary
I The txa.nslation used is that of McGowan, The Flowers of Evil, 33. TI-ans.

The Fork and the Spoon

I A sou was a five-centime coin. Trans.

Water and Fire

x Gaston Bachelard, La Psych analyse du feu fPads: Gallimard-Folio, x949J 149.
127

Chronology and Meteorology

I "Resourcefulness" is txanslated as debrouillardise in French: a fight against
brouillard, or fog. TI-ans.

Left and Right

r An ecorche is a statue representing a skinless human being or animal that is
used as a study model by art students. The term also appears in the quotation
from Valexy at the end of "Surface and Depth."

A Priori and A Posteriori

I The quotation is from The Dialogues of Plato, 3d ed., vol. 2, trans. Benjamin
Jowett (London: Oxford University Press, x892J, p. 40. Dans.

The Spring and the Bush

1 Andre Chouraqui, Moise (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1995 J.
Index of Names

Adorno, Theodor !German philoso­ Barres, Maurice (French wtiter and pol­
pher, b. Frankfurt 1903, d. Viege, itician, b. Charmes, Vosges, 1862, d.
Switzerland, 1969 ), 5 S Paris 1923 ), 107
Anselm, Saint !Archbishop of Canter­ Baselitz, Georg !German painter, b.
bury, b. Aosta 1033, d. Canterbury Deutsch-Baselitz 1938), 66
lI09), I20 Baudelaire, Charles !French poet, b.
Apollinaire, Guillaume !French poet, b. Paris 18:1.1, d. 1867), xiii- xiv, 13, 38,
Rome 1880, d. Paris 1918), 69 68,120
Aragon, Louis [French wtiter and poet, Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron
b. Paris I 897, d. 1982), S 3 de (French wtiter, b. Paris, 1732, d.
Aristotle (Greek philosopher, b. 1799), 39
Stagira, Macedonia, 3 84, d. Chalcis, Beethoven, Ludwig von (German com­
Evvoia, 322 B.c.), vii, r, 104 poser, b. Bonn 1770, d. Vienna 1827),
Arletty [French actress, b. Courbevoie 89, 107
1898, d. Paris 1992), 35 Beranger, Pierre-Jean de [French singer,
Avedon, Richard !American photogra­ b. Paris 1780, d. 1857), 7;.
pher,b. New York 1923), rr4 Bergson, Henri (French philosopher, b.
Paris 1859, d. 1941), xi, IO, 61, 68-69,
Bachelard, Gaston !French philosopher, 100,103
b. Bar-sur-Aube 1884, d. Paris 1962), Bernanos, Georges (French writer, b.
xi, xvii, 51 Paris 1888, d. Neuilly 1948), 65
Bacon, Francis !British painter, b. Dub­ Bernard, Claude jF1ench physiologist,
lin 1909, d. Madrid 1992), 66 b. Saint-Julien, Rhone, 1813, d. Paris
Balladur, Edouard (French politician, b. 1878), II3
IzmiI 1929), viii, 42 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques­
Balzac, Honore de (French wtiter, b. Henri [French writer, b. Le Havre
Tours 1799, d. Paris 1850), 22, 66, 91 1737, d. Eragny-sur-Oise 1814), 74
Bardot, Brigitte (French actress, b. Berkeley, George (Irish bishop and phi­
Paris, 1934), 6 losopher,b. Kilkenny 1685, d. Oxford
Barrault, Jean-Louis [French actor and 1753), U2
director, b. Le Vesinet 19 IO, d. Paris Bizet, Georges [French composer, b.
1994), 35 Paris 1838, d. Bougival 1875), 63
Barre, Raymond (French politician, b. Bloy, Leon [French writer, b. Perigueux
Saint-Denis de la Reunion 1924), viii, 1846, d. Bourg-la-Reine 1917), 98,
42 I2I
 Boehme, Jakob (German mystic, b. Alt­ Cocteau, Jean iFrench writer, b.
seidenberg 1575, d. Gorlitz 1624), 65 Maisons-Laffitte 1889, d. Milly,la­
Bosco, Henri (French writer, b. Avignon Foret 1963), 20, 64, 91
1888, d. Nice 1976), 54 Cohen, Albert {French writer, b. Corfu
Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne iFrench 1895, d. Geneva 1981), 107-8
preacher, b. Dijon 1627, d. Paris Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Caritat
1704), 12 de (French philosopher, b. Ribemont
Boubat, Edouard (French photogxapher, 1743, d. Bourg-la-Reine 1794), 98
130 b. Paris 1923), II3 Conrad, Joseph {British novelist of Po­
Brassai:, Gyula Halasz iFrench pho­ lish origin,b. Berdichev 1857, d. Can­
togxapher c;;f Romanian origin, b. terbury 1924), 13
Brasov 1899, d. Nice 1984), 92 Copernicus, Nicholas (Polish astron­
Brasseur, Pierre {French actor, b. Paris omer, b. Torun 1473, d. Frauenburg
1905, d. Brunico, Italy, 1972), 35 1543), 90
Byron, George Gordon Lord {British Corday, Charlotte {Marat's assassin, b.
poet, b. London 1788, d. Missolonghi Saint-Saturnin-des- Ligxieries 1768,
1824), 120 d. Paris 1793), 24

Canguilhem, Georges {Fren&li'Philoso­ Debussy, Claude {French composer, b.

pher, b. Castelnaudary r904), 16 Saint-Germain-en-Laye 1862, d.
Came, Marcel (French film director, b. Paris 1918), 85
Paris 1906), 35 Defoe, Daniel (English writer, b. Lon­
Cartier-Bresson, Henri (French pho­ don 1660,d. 1731), 40
togxapher, film director, and artist, b. Degas,Edgar !French painter, b. Paris
Chanteloup 1908), 92, II3 1834, d. l9l7), 86
Celine, Louis-Ferdinand {French writer, De Gaulle, Charles iFrench general and
b. Courbevoie 1894, d. Meudon politician, b. Lille 1890, d.
1961), 66, 98 Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises 1970),
Cervantes,Miguel de {Spanish writer, viii, 42
b. AlcaladeHenares 1547, d. Madrid Derrida, Jacques {French philosopher,
r616), 39 b. El Biar 1930), xiv
Chateaubriand, Fran,;:ois Rene de Descartes, Rene {French philosopher
(French writer, b. Saint-Malo 1768, d. and scientist, b. The Hague 1596, d.
Paris 1848), 66, 74, 89 Stockholm 1560), xi, xii, 87, 88
Chirac, Jacques iFrench politician, b. Detaille, Edouard (French painter, b.
Paris 1932), viii, 42 Paris 1848, d. 1913), 107
Chouraqui, Andre (Jewish writer and Diderot, Denis (French writer and phi­
politician, b. Ain-Temouchent, Al­ losopher, b. Langres r7r3, d. Paris
geria, 1917), rr7 l784), 12
Claudel, Paul !French writer, b. Doisneau, Rohen [French photogxa­
Villeneuve-sur-Fcre 1868, d. Paris pher, b. Gentilly 1912, d. Paris 1994),
1955), 121 92
Dostoyevski, Fyodor Mikhaylovitch ventor, b. Charleston 1813, d. De
(Russian writer, b. Moscow r82I, d. Kalb 1906), 37
Saint Petersburg 1881), 81, 107 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von !German
Dumas, Alexandre !French writer, b. writer, b. Frankfurt-on-Main 1749, d.
Villers-Cotterets 1802, d. Puys, near Weimar 1832), ix, 29-30, 40, 9 2, ro7,
Dieppe, 1870), 5 3, 99 121
Durand, Gilbert (French sociologist Gracq, Julien (French writer, b. Saint­
and literary critic, b. Chambery Florent-le-Vieil 1910), 32, 54
1921), xii-xiii Grenier, Jean (French philosopher, b. 131
Paris 1898, d. Vernouillet 1971), II6
Epictetus (Greek philosopher in Rome,
b. Hierapolis 50, d. Nicopolis 130), 39 Hadrian (Roman emperor, b. Italica,
Baetica, 76, d. Baiae 138), 9 5
Farrere, Claude (pseud. of Frederic Bar­ Halley, Edmund (English astronomer,
gone, French naval officer and writer, b. London r656, d. Greenwich 1742),
b. Lyon 1876, d. Paris r957), 54 II3
Feydeau, Georges (French writer, b. Hamelin, Octave (French philosopher,
Paris 1862, d. Rueil 1921), 72 b. Le Lion d'Angers, Maine- et-Loire,
Flaubert, Gustave (French writer, b. 1856, d. Hucket, Landes, 1907), 1-2,
Rauen r821, d. Croisset 1880), "-3, 97, IOI
67, 70, III Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (Ger­
Fontane, Theodor {German writer, b. man philosopher, b. Stuttgart rno,
Neuruppin 1819, d. Berlin 1898), ro7 d. Berlin r83r), 89
Francis of Assisi, Saint (Founder of the Heidegger, Martin (German philoso­
Franciscan order, b.Assisi 11th, d. pher, b. Messkirch i889, d. Freiburg­
1226), 81 im-Breisgau 1976), xiv, 65, 122
Fratellini, Annie (Circus performer, b. Helias, Pierre Jakez (French writer, b.
Algiers 1932, d. Paris 1997), 42 Pouldreuzic 1914), 54, ro6
Freud, Sigmund (Austrian psychiatrist, Heraclitus (Greek philosopher, b.
founder of psychoanalysis, b. Ephesus ca. 540, d. ca. 480 B.C.), r22
Freiberg, Moravia, 1856, d. London Herault de Sechelles, Marie-Tean
1939), xiii (French politician, b. Paris 1759, d.
1794), ro8
Gautier, Theophile (French writer, b. Herder, fohann Gottfried (German
Tarbes 18rr, d. Neuilly 1872-), 85 writer, b, Mohrunger, 1744, d,
Gide, Andre (French writer, b. Paris Weimar, 1803), 29
1869, d. 195 r), 17, 57, 74- 75, 91, 107 Heredia, Tose-Maria de (French poet, b.
Giono, Jean (French writer, b. Man­ La Fortuna, Cuba, 1842, d. Houdan
osque 1895, d. 1970), ix, 35, 54 1905), 66
Giscard d'Estaing, Valery (French pol­ Herge, Georges (Belgian cartoonist, b.
itician, b. Coblence r926), viii, 42 Etterbeck 1907, d. Brussels 1983),
Glidden, Joseph Farwell (American in- 13
Hesse, Hermann (German writer, natu- Larbaud, Valery !French writer, b.
ralized Swiss, b. Calw, Wurtemberg, Vichy 1881,d. 1957), 34
1877, d. Montagnola, Ticino, 1962 ), Lartigue, Jacques Henri !French pho-
54-55 tographer, b. Courbevoie 1894, d.
Hitler,Adolf !German pohtician, b. Nice 1986), 92
Braunau, Austria, 1889, d. Berhn La Varende, Jean Mallard, Count of
1945), 86-87 !French writer, b. Le Chamblac 1887,
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus d. Paris 1959), 54
!German �iter and composer, b. Lavelle, Louis (French philosopher, b.
Konigsberg r776, d. Berhn 1822), 5 r Saint-Martin-de.Villereal 1883, d.
Hugo, Victor !French writer, b. Besan­ 1951),71
(,On 1802, d. Paris 1885), xili, 53, Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie (French
66 poet, b. Saint-Paul de la Reunion
Husserl, Edmund !German philoso­ 1818, d. near Louveciennes 1894), 26,
pher, b. Possnitz, Moravia, 1858, d. 66
Freiburg-im-Breisgau 1938), xi, xo3, Leibniz, Gott&ied Wilhelm !German
I22 philosopher,b. Leipzig 1646, d.
�"' Hanover 1716), vii, xi, xii, 1, 104-5,
Ingres, Jean Auguste !French painter, b. 120
Montauban 1780, d. Paris 1867), 73 Le Senne, Rene (French philosopher, b.
Elbeuf 1882, d. Paris 19 54), 68
John the Baptist, Saint !Jewish prophet, Levi-Strauss, Claude !French anthro­
died ca. 28 A.D.), 25 pologist, b. Brussels 1908), 14, 77
Jouve, Pierre Jean !French writer, b. Loti, Pierre (pseud. of Louis-Marie­
Arras r887, d. Paris 1976), 9 Juhen Viaud, French writer, b.
Rochefort 1850, d. Hendaye 1923),
Kant, Immanuel (German philosopher, 54,65
b. Konigsberg 1724, d. 1804),vii, r, Louis XIV !King of France, b. Saint­
74,83,100,ro2,rr4 Germain-en-Laye 1638, d. Versailles
Kertesz, Andre (American photogra­ 1715), 62, 90, 98, II2
pher of Hungarian origin, b. Budapest Lucretius (Roman poet, b. Rome 98,d.
1894, d. New York 1985),92 55 B.C.), 59
Koster, Serge (French writer, b. Paris
1940),19 Maeterlinck,Maurice !Belgian writer,
b. Gand 1862, d. Nice 1949), IOI
La Bruyere, Jean de (French writer, b. Maistre, Joseph de (French writer, b.
Paris 1645, d. Versailles 1696), 6 Chambery 1753, d. Turin r82r), 98
Lamartine, Alphonse de !French poet, Mallarme, Stephane (French poet, b.
b. Ma.con 1790, d. Paris 1869), III Paris 1842, d. Valvins 1898), x-xi, 86
Lanza del Vasto (French poet of Sicilian Mann,Thomas (German writer, b.
origin, b. San Vito dei Normanni, Sic­ Liibeck 1875, d. Kilchberg, near
ily, 1901,d. 1981), rr Zurich, 1955), 54-55, 107
Marat, fean-Paul (French doctor, law­ Muhammad (Arab prophet, b. Mecca
yer, and politician, b. Baudry, Neu­ ca. 570, d. Medina 632), 79
chatel, 1743, d. Paris 1793), 24 Munch, Edvard (Norwegian painter, b.
Marchais, Georges {French politician, Loten 1863, d. Oslo 1944), 66
b. La Hoguette 19201, viii, 42
Marx, Groucho (American actor, b. Napoleon (French politician, b. Ajaccio
New York 1890, d. Los Angeles 1769, d. Saint Helena 1821), 4.:1-, 45,
1977), vii, 5 84-85,89
Marx, Karl (German philosopher, b. Nero (Roman emperor, b. Antium 37, 133
Trier 1818, d. London 1883), vii, 4 d. Rome 68), 39
Maupassant, Guy de (French writer, b. Newton, Sir Isaac (English mathemati­
Tourville-sur-Arques 1850, d. Paris cian, physicist, and astronomer, b.
1893), 64 Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, 1642, d.
Mauriac, Fran�ois (French writer, b. Kensington, Middlesex, 1727), 92
Bordeaux, 1885, d. Paris, 1970), 54, Nietzsche, Friedrich (German philoso­
57, 841 121 pher, b. Rocken, Saxony, 1841, d.
May, Karl (German writer, b. Weimar 1900),xii-xiv, 55, 62-63 1 74,
Hohenstein-Ernsttal 1842, d. IOO-IOI

Radebul, near Dresden, 19u), 54

Milton, fohn (English poet, b. London Pagnol, Marcel !French writer, b.
1608, d. Chalfont Saint Giles 1674), Aubagne 1895 1 d. Paris 1974)1 ix,
120 35
Mitterrand, Fran�is (French politician, Parmenides (Greek philosopher, b. Elea
b. Jarnac 1916, d. Paris 1996), viii, 42 ca. 515, d. ca. 450B.c.), 122
Moliere (pseud. of Jean-Baptiste Po­ Pascal, Blaise (French mathematician,
quelin, French playwright, b. Paris physicist, and philosopher, b.
1622, d. 1673), ix, 35 Clermont-Ferrand 16.:1-3, d. Paris
Monet, Claude (French painter, b. Paris 166.:1-), 64
18401 d. Givemy 1926), 66 Pasteur, Louis (French chemist and bi­
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (French ologist, b. Dole 1822 1 d. Villeneuve­
writer, b. Saint-Michel de Montaigne l'Etang 1895), 16
1533, d. 1592), 7, 81 Paul, Saint (Christian apostle, b.
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Tar_sus, Cilicia, 5-15, d. Rome 62-
Baron of (French writer, b. Bordeaux 67}, 95
1689, d. Paris 1755), 46 Perrault, Charles (French writer, b.
Morand, Paul (French writer, b. Paris Paris 1628, d. 1703}, 13
1888, d. 19761, 19, 54 Perse, Saint-John {French poet, b.
Moses (Jewish prophet, 13th century Pointe-a-Pitre 1887, d. Giens 1975),
B.C.), II7-I9 66, 83, 85
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus !Austrian Picasso, Pablo Ruiz (Spanish artist, b.
composer, b. Salzbuzg 1756, d. Malaga 1881, d. Mougins 1973),
Vienna 1791), 9, 39, 89 53
 Plato (Greek philosopher, b. Athens 42 7, Sartre, Jean-Paul (French philosopher,
d. 348B.c.J1 xi, xii, 89, 1021 104, II4 b. Paris 1905, d. 1980), xi, 531 65, 86,
Poe, Edgar Allan(American writer, b. 89,103,121, 12:2-23
Boston 1809, d. Baltimore 1849J1 51 Schubert, Franz (Austrian composer, b.
Ponge, Francis !French writer, b. Vienna 1797, d. 18:28), 29
Montpellie11899, d. Paris 1988J, 52 Scott, Sir Walter !British writer, b.
Pourrat, Henri !French writer, b. Am­ Edinburgh 17711 d. Abbotsford 1832),
bert 18871 d. 1959), 54, 106 53
1 34 Frevert, Jacques (French poet, b. Segur, Sophie Rostopchine, Countess
Neuilly-sur-Seine 19001 d. of (French writer of Russian origin, b.
Omonville-la-Petite 1977J 1 36 Saint Petersburg 1799, d. Paris 1874),
Proust, Marcel (French writer, b. Paris 13
18711 d. 1922), 661 68 Shakespeare, William !English writer,
b. Stratford-on-Avon 15641 d. 1616J,
Raimu(French actor, b. Toulon 18831 d. 29, 53
Neuilly-sur-Seine 1946)1 35 Soutine, Chaim !Lithuanian painter, b.
Renan, Ernest (French writer, b. Tre­ Smilovitchi 18931 d. Paris 1943J, 66
guier 18231 d. Paris 1892), 77 Spinoza, Baiuch !Dutch philosopher of
Renard, Jules (French write�,, Portuguese origin, b. Amsterdam
Chalons, Mayenne, 18641 d. Paris 1632, d. The Hague 1677)1 xi,xii, 88-
1910), 44 89, 107
Rimbaud, Aithur(French poet, b. Storm, Theodor !German writer, b.
Charleville 18541 d. Marseille r891J1 Husum 18171 d. Hademaischen
13,9 3 1888),107
Rolland, Romain(French writer, b.
Clamecy 1866, d. Vezelay 1944J, IO? Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles Maurice
Romains, Jules (French writer, h. Saint­ de !French politician, b. Paris 1754, d.
Julien-Chapteuil 1885, d. Paris 1972)1 1838), 42,84-85
7 Tirso de Molina (Spanish playwright, b.
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (American Madrid 1583, d. Soria 1648)1 8-9, 39
politician, b. Hyde Park 1882, d. Titian(Italian painter, b. Pieve di Ca­
Waim Springs 1945)1 111 dore,Venetia, 1488-891 d. Venice
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (French writer, 1576), 73
b. Geneva 1712, d. Ermenonville Tolstoy, Count Lev Nikolayevich (Rus­
1778), 12, 42, 74, 84, 94 sian writer, b. Yasnaya Polyana 1828,
d. Astapovo 19ro)1 107
Saint-Exupery, Antoine de !French Tournier, Michel (French writer, b.
writer and pilot, b. Lyon 1900, disap­ Paris r9:24), vii-xiv, 3 5
peared near Corsica 19441, 50
Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, Duke Valery, Paul(French poet, b. Sete r871,
of !French writer, b. Paris 16751 d. d. Paris 1945), vii, 47, 74-75, 85, 86,
1755), 66, 85 103, I:2 I
Van Gogh, Vincent (Dutch painter, b. Wells, Herbert George [British journal­
Groot-Zundert 1853, d. Auvers-sur­ ist and novelist, b. Bromley, Kent,
Oise I 890), 73 1866, d. London 1946), roo
Verne, Jules (French writer, b. Nantes Weston, Edward (American photogra­
1828, d.Amiens 1905), 54, 82-83 pher, b. Highland Park, illinois, 1886,
Vian, Boris (French writer, b. Ville- d. 1958), 92
d'Avray 1920, d. Paris 1959), 13
Vincenot, Henri [French writer, b. Di­ Yeats, William Butler [Irish poet, b.
jon 1912), 54, ro6 Dublin 1865, d. Roquebrune-Cap­ 1 35
Voltaire, Fran�ois-Marie Arouet Martin, France, 1939), vii
[French writer, b. Paris r 694, d.
1778), 42, 84 Zola, Emile (French writer, b. Paris
1840, d. 1902), xiii-xiv, 33, 66
Wagner, Richard {German composer, b.
Leipzig 1813, d. Venice 1883), 63