The Elegance of the Hedgehog (14 page)

B
ut Manuela, not terribly sensitive to the little steps of Japanese women, is already steering us toward another territory.

“That Rosen woman is in a regular state because Monsieur Ozu hasn’t got two lamps that are the same.”

“Really?” I say, taken aback.

“Yes, really. And why is that? The Rosens have two of everything, because they’re afraid they’ll end up missing something. You know Madame Rosen’s favorite story?”

“No,” I reply, already enthralled to think where this conversation might lead.

“During the war her grandfather, who had tons of stuff stored in his cellar, saved his family by doing a favor for a German who was looking for a spool of thread to sew a button back onto his uniform. If her grandfather hadn’t had the thread, he would have been toast, and everyone else along with him. So believe it or not, in her cupboards and in the cellar she has two of everything. And does that make her any happier? And can you see any better in a room just because you have two lamps exactly the same?”

“I’ve never thought about it. But it’s true that we tend to decorate our interiors with superfluous things.”

“Super what things?”

“Things we don’t really need, like at the Arthens’. The same lamps and two identical vases on the mantelpiece, the same identical armchairs on either side of the sofa, two matching night tables, rows of identical jars in the kitchen . . . ”

“Now you make me think, it’s not just about the lamps. In fact, there aren’t two of anything in Monsieur Ozu’s apartment. Well, I must say it makes a pleasant impression.”

“Pleasant in what way?”

She thinks for a moment, wrinkling her brow.

“Pleasant like after the Christmas holidays, when you’ve had too much to eat. I think about the way it feels when everyone has left . . . My husband and I, we go to the kitchen, I make up a little bouillon with fresh vegetables, I slice some mushrooms real thin and we have our bouillon with those mushrooms in it. You get the feeling you’ve just come through a storm, and it’s all calm again.”

“No more fear of being short of anything. You’re happy with the present moment.”

“You feel it’s natural—and that’s the way it should be, when you eat.”

“You enjoy what you have, there’s no competition. One sensation after the other.”

“Yes, you have less but you enjoy it more.”

“Who can manage to eat several things at once?”

“Not even poor Monsieur Arthens.”

“I have two matching night tables with two identical lamps,” I say, suddenly remembering.

“Me too,” replies Manuela.

She nods.

“Maybe we’re all sick, with this too much of everything.”

She gets up, kisses me on the cheek and heads back to her toil as a modern-day slave at the Pallières’. After she has left I sit on with my empty tea cup. There is one chocolate Florentine left, which I nibble out of greediness, with my front teeth, like a mouse. If you change the way you crunch into something, it is like trying something new.

And I sit meditating, savoring the unexpected and incongruous nature of our conversation. Who has ever heard of a maid and a concierge making use of their afternoon break to ponder the cultural significance of interior decoration? You would be surprised by what ordinary little people come out with. They may prefer stories to theories, anecdotes to concepts, images to ideas—that doesn’t stop them from philosophizing. So: have our civilizations become so destitute that we can only live in our fear of want? Can we only enjoy our possessions or our senses when we are certain that we shall always be able to enjoy them? Perhaps the Japanese have learned that you can only savor a pleasure when you know it is ephemeral and unique; armed with this knowledge, they are yet able to weave their lives.

I am weary. Dull repetition has come to tear me from my thoughts once again—boredom was born on a day of uniformity. Someone is ringing at my loge.

A
t the door stands a courier, chewing on what must be a piece of gum for elephants, given the vigor and range of mandibular activity to which he is compelled.

“Madame Michel?” he asks.

He thrusts a package into my hands.

“Nothing to sign?” I ask.

But he has already vanished.

It is a rectangular package wrapped in sturdy brown paper and tied with string, of the type used to close sacks of potatoes, or which you might attach to a cork and subsequently drag around the apartment for the entertainment of a cat that must be tricked into getting the only exercise to which he will consent. In fact, this package tied up with string makes me think of Manuela’s tissue-paper wrapping because, although the paper is more rustic than refined, there is something similar in the care given to the authenticity of the wrapping, something deeply consonant. You might note that the most noble concepts often emerge from the most coarse and commonplace things.
Beauty is consonance
is a sublime thought, handed to me by a ruminating courier.

If you think about it at all seriously, esthetics are really nothing more than an initiation to the Way of Consonance, a sort of Way of the Samurai applied to the intuition of authentic forms. We all have a knowledge of harmony, anchored deep within. It is this knowledge that enables us, at every instant, to apprehend quality in our lives and, on the rare occasions when everything is in perfect harmony, to appreciate it with the apposite intensity. And I am not referring to the sort of beauty that is the exclusive preserve of Art. Those who feel inspired, as I do, by the greatness of small things will pursue them to the very heart of the inessential where, cloaked in everyday attire, this greatness will emerge from within a certain ordering of ordinary things and from the certainty that
all is as it should be
, the conviction that
it is fine this way
.

I untie the string and tear the paper. It’s a book, a fine edition bound in navy blue leather of a coarse texture that is very
wabi
. In Japanese
wabi
means “an understated form of beauty, a quality of refinement masked by rustic simplicity.” I’m not really sure what this means but this binding is most definitely
wabi
.

I put on my glasses and decipher the title.

Birch trees
Teach me that I am nothing
And that I am deserving of life

M
aman announced at the dinner table last night, as if it were a pretext to let the champagne flow freely, that it was exactly ten years ago that she started her “anaaalysis.” Everyone will agree that this is absolutely maaarvelous. As far as I can see, only psychoanalysis can compete with Christians in their love of drawn-out suffering. What my mother didn’t say is that it’s also been exactly ten years since she started taking anti-depressants. But apparently she doesn’t see the connection. Personally I don’t think she’s taking the anti-depressants to ease her anxiety but rather to endure the analysis. When she describes her sessions, it’s enough to make you want to bang your head against the wall. The guy says “hmmm” at regular intervals, and repeats the end of her sentences (“And I went to Lenôtre’s with my mother”: “Hmmm, your mother?” “I do so like chocolate.”: “Hmmm, chocolate?”). If this is how it is, I can set up shop as a psychoanalyst tomorrow. He gives her copies of lectures from the “Freudian Cause” which, contrary to what you might think, aren’t just some sort of rebus but are actually supposed to mean something. Fascination with intelligence is in itself fascinating, but I don’t think it’s a value in itself. There are tons of intelligent people out there and there are a lot of retards, too. I’m going to say something really banal, but intelligence, in itself, is neither valuable nor interesting. Very intelligent people have devoted their lives to the question of the sex of angels, for example. But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed. If you could see all the bum-fodder Maman brings home from her “sessions” . . . Full of the Symbolic, and foreclusion, and subsuming the Real, with the help of a whole lot of mathematical formulae and dubious syntax. It’s complete rubbish! Even the texts that Colombe is reading (she’s working on William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century Franciscan monk) are not nearly as ludicrous. Conclusion: better to be a thinking monk than a post-modern thinker.

In addition, it was a Freudian day. That afternoon I was eating chocolate. I really like chocolate and it is probably the only thing I have in common with Maman and my sister. While I was biting into a bar with hazelnuts, I felt one of my teeth crack. I went to look at myself in the mirror and saw that I had indeed lost a little chip off my incisor. This summer in Quimper at the market I tripped on a rope and fell over and already broke half of this tooth and since then tiny pieces have been crumbling off from time to time. Anyway, I lost that little piece of incisor and it made me laugh because I remember what Maman said about a dream she’s been having often lately: she is losing her teeth, they go all black and fall out one after the other. And so this is what her analyst said about the dream: “Chère madame, a Freudian would tell you that it is a dream about death.” That’s funny, no? It’s not even the naiveté of his interpretation (falling teeth = death, umbrella = penis, etc.), as if culture did not have huge powers of suggestion that have nothing to do with reality. He thinks that in this way he will establish his intellectual superiority (“a Freudian would say”) over mere erudition (he wants you to know he is distancing himself from Freud)—but you’re left with the impression that it’s a parrot who is speaking.

Fortunately, to get over all of this, I went to Kakuro’s today to drink tea and eat coconut cookies that were very good and very refined. He came to our door to invite me and said to Maman, “We met in the elevator and we were in the middle of a very interesting discussion.” “Oh, really?” said Maman, surprised. “Well, you are very lucky indeed, my daughter hardly speaks to us.” Turning to me he said, “Would you like to come and have a cup of tea and let me introduce you to my cats?” and of course Maman, enticed by where this could lead, accepted eagerly on my behalf. She already had her modern-geisha-invited-to-rich-Japanese-man’s-house plan in her head. One of the reasons that everyone is so fascinated with Monsieur Ozu is that he really is very rich (so they say). In short, I went to have tea at his place and meet his cats. On that point I’m really not any more convinced by his cats than by mine but at least Kakuro’s cats are truly decorative. I explained my point of view on the matter, and he replied that he believed in the radiance and sensitivity of an oak tree, and all the more so where cats are concerned. We went on to discuss the definition of intelligence and he asked me if he could write down my formula in his moleskine notebook: “It is not a sacred gift, it is a primate’s only weapon.”

And then we got to talking about Madame Michel again. He thinks her cat is named Leo for Leo Tolstoy and we agreed that a concierge who reads Tolstoy and books published by Vrin may not be your ordinary concierge. He even has some very pertinent reasons for thinking that she must really like
Anna Karenina
and he has decided to send her a copy. “We’ll see how she reacts,” he said.

But that is not my profound thought for the day. It comes from something that Kakuro said. We were talking about Russian literature, which I haven’t read at all. Kakuro was explaining that what he loves in Tolstoy’s novels is that they are “whole world novels” and moreover they take place in Russia, a country where there are birch trees wherever you look, and during the Napoleonic wars the aristocracy had to learn to speak Russian all over again because before that they only ever spoke French. Well, that’s just grown-up chitchat but what is great about Kakuro is that he is so polite in everything he does. It’s really pleasant to listen to him talking, even if you don’t care about what he’s saying, because he is truly talking to you, he is addressing himself to you. This is the first time I have met someone who cares about me when he is talking: he’s not looking for approval or disagreement, he looks at me as if he to say, “Who are you? Do you want to talk to me? How nice it is to be here with you!” That is what I meant by saying he is polite—this attitude that gives the other person the impression of really being there. Anyway, basically, this Russia of the great Russians, I really couldn’t care less. They spoke French? Big deal! So do I, and I don’t exploit the muzhiks. But on the other hand, and I can’t really understand why, I do care about the birch trees. Kakuro was talking about the Russian campaign, and all the swaying, rustling birch trees, and I felt light, so light . . .

After I’d had a chance to think about it for a while I began to understand why I felt this sudden joy when Kakuro was talking about the birch trees. I get the same feeling when anyone talks about trees, any trees: the linden tree in the farmyard, the oak behind the old barn, the stately elms that have all disappeared now, the pine trees along wind-swept coasts, etc. There’s so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature . . . yes, that’s it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are—vile parasites squirming
on the surface
of the earth—and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.

Kakuro was talking about birch trees and, forgetting all those psychoanalysts and intelligent people who don’t know what to do with their intelligence, I suddenly felt my spirit expand, for I was capable of grasping the utter beauty of the trees.