When I Was Old (8 page)

De Gaulle spoke of the greatness of France because the Frenchman loves to hear his greatness talked about. Where will this lead him? He doesn't know himself. Now it is his legend that takes over and rules him.

I'm not interested in politics. But still I'm intrigued by a problem posed by politics: that of sincerity and insincerity.

That of politicians as well as that of the crowd which follows or attacks them.

If all of them are irresponsible? If …

That's enough for today. I've mixed everything up. As I do when I'm falling asleep. Just as last night when I was trying to sleep and all this – and many other things which I have fortunately forgotten – passed through my head.

Then I took an Imménoctal.

I would be curious to leaf through an anthology (which may exist, for someone must have thought of it before me): a collection of all the national songs of the world, present and, preferably, past.

The comparison between them would be revealing, it seems to me.

First, the changes in the course of time, which would give an indication, or rather illuminate the evolution of the sentiments of human groups.

Villages, then provinces, then nations. Each village is
persuaded that it is more intelligent and above all stronger than its neighbour.

I believe that one would find almost the same thing in the national songs, the same words, the same phrases: we're the strongest, the bravest. We are calm, peaceful, but our arms are ready, prepared to defend our rights, our liberties …

At the discovery of America, it was found that each Indian tribe had its motto. The same for each black tribe in Africa. No doubt in Asia too.

Peaceful and strong. Fearless. No one is afraid.

Approximately the same attitude is found in children.

Check also how many times the word ‘God' recurs. Each tribe, each nation, is protected by its god, who is often, and increasingly so, the same as its neighbours'.

I would like to compare all these songs, sentence by sentence, word by word.

Huge scholarly volumes are written on the style of this or that writer, on his use of adverbs or commas, etc.

Wouldn't it be at least as interesting, if not more so … But, once more, no doubt it's been done, just as the little ideas, the embryo ideas that I put in these notebooks must have been expressed many times more fully and knowledgeably. That's why I only touch on them, out of a sort of modesty, sure I'm repeating myself, and continually tempted to put a final period to these notes which would make a laughing stock of me if they ever saw the light.

What I just said about national songs is connected with what I was writing yesterday. The need of peoples
to believe in something, in themselves. The need to create heroes for themselves. They believe that they decide and that they are free. But they are slaves.

Who really decides for the masses? One often speaks of financiers, of great private interest groups, in copper, in oil, etc.

And if they themselves are only pawns?

Who decides? No one, I think. The cohesion of History is not apparent because it is visible (?) only after the fact.

So there would not be any great men among those who seem to rule the people, and the others, scholars, artists, really capture only a moment in the evolution of the world, explain only the small truth of an instant. Rather, they are mediums, what were once called prophets. One out of a hundred thousand or out of a million sees aright, expresses a truth that is found to coincide with the truth of their period or of the next.

They are all only human beings. And no one yet has given a definition of the human being.

Isn't it remarkable that we continue to seek one?

Along the way, we find everything, gunpowder, the compass, the infinitely small, and the laws that rule the infinitely large, atomic and electronic energy.

We do the best we can.

This question of sincerity or of insincerity is only, after all, the question of good and evil. (I wrote
only
as if that
simplified the problem.) But I've ceased to believe in evil. Only in illness. And that's questionable, too.

On the subject of the ‘menders of destinies' whom I believe I've already mentioned, a detail comes back to me which I'd forgotten. When very young, I used to dream of being one, or, on the other hand, of benefiting from their advice.

But now I'm sure of one thing: towards the age of twenty, when I was beginning to write popular novels and stories to earn a living, writing in the evening, for myself, pages that remained unpublished, it occurred to me to want to work in peace, without material ambition. I would have liked to be given so much a month for life, regulating my time, taking care of my health, etc., and I would have written with no worry. I would have been ready, at that period, to give up my literary rights for such an arrangement. And I wouldn't have asked for luxury. A decent life with a modicum of comfort in a modest neighbourhood. So I wasn't materially ambitious. Did I become so later on? I suspect so. A house mouse and a field mouse at the same time.

Still on the subject of cynicism. I think that a king believes, or rather used to believe, he was king by divine right, used to believe in his mission; in the necessity, in the name of his country or dynasty, to fight his enemies, indeed even members of his family. The Pope ends by believing himself Pope. The general believes in the necessity of sacrificing a hundred thousand men in a
battle. Truman believed in his right to drop an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

I once knew a gentleman farmer, a young thirty-year-old count, who owned a huge manor and several farms. He had just married a girl who was not an aristocrat but who brought him twenty-five or twenty-eight farms as dowry. He bought his clothes at bargain stores and they lived penuriously in a château crammed with treasures. I remember some details. Next to a telephone which might be used by the rare guests, there was a saucer and a sign: ‘Please deposit X francs for each call.' This was during the war. One could not make long-distance calls. So a call was very cheap.

One day we were talking about marrying for love, and he expressed himself frankly.

‘This is something forbidden to us. We have received a heritage from our ancestors. We are only trustees during our lifetime. We must pass it on intact, and if possible increased, to our heirs.'

He was sincere; he ate little even when he was hungry. Though he was a young man, and this was not in the last century, but in 1942.

He did the marketing himself; after having ordered fish for his wife and himself, he asked for fish that was less fresh for the servants.

He saw no harm in it.

We speak of conscience which alerts us to distinguish between good and evil. How can it vary from place to place and period to period?

My count had an easy conscience. So did Truman.
Also the cannibals whom I've met in equatorial forests. It's only the sense of sin that creates the sin, the taboos of the place and the period.

Once written down that way, it looks idiotic. Nevertheless my idea, confused enough, it's true, is that in the last analysis each one believes in the necessity of what he does, or in its usefulness …

One kills one's enemies in war. The Pope blesses cannons and armies. But if an individual murderer, let us say, is a schizophrenic, aren't all men his enemies?

This has been said so much better, so often!

Why does one persist in living and in thinking, in teaching others to think ‘as if'?

But who is ‘one', since those who invent morals, who teach them, who define them or impose them, believe or end by believing in them?

Nixon really believes himself the champion of the United States, de Gaulle the rebuilder of France. Nobody locks them up. If they were not their own dupes at the beginning, I would swear they have become so.

Like my count, with his collection plate by the telephone and his spoiled fish for the servants.

In short, no tyrant and no victim. Only victims. This is almost what I wanted to say. Only almost.

(The rest, and, I hope, the end of this subject, which is beginning to sound more and more like vacation
homework. In fact it is, since we're still in Venice. We're leaving Saturday morning, and I will go back to my usual thoughts again in my study.)

The first man who declared himself king by divine right was no doubt neither a swindler nor even a man of ambition in the usual sense of the word. He believed himself king by divine right. Many around him believed that he was, some, most probably, pretended to believe it out of self-interest. And they then discovered that it was their duty to continue to pretend. Their duty to serve.

Jesus must also have believed that he was the son of God. But he did come to doubt it.

Perhaps this is the real tragedy. They all came to doubt. Their followers, their ‘faithful', prevented them from reversing their stand.

After that, many men believed themselves kings, emperors, or gods. Most of them were shut up in psychiatric hospitals. They came too late. They were imitators.

The use the Russians have made of Pavlov's theory is much discussed, including its use in surgery, in which they use conditioned reflexes to replace anaesthesia.

For centuries the Catholic Church, and before it other religions (less systematically, less well), used the same principle.

If you don't believe, or if you doubt, pray. Recite sentences to a prescribed rhythm. Music. On your knees. Stand. On your knees. Bow your head …

People talk about their brainwashing, too.

In religion, it begins with baptism, catechism, first
communion, etc. On waking, at table, before and after meals, at noon, at night …

‘I am guilty.'

By my birth as a human being, I am guilty, each day, at each hour. According to the day, the Gospel, the time of the year, I am torn between hope and despair, between paradise and hell, between evil and good.

The child, the young man, the young woman, the father, the mother, the old man, the dying, all are guilty, and ceremonies absolve them, stage by stage.

Bear children in pain … Earn one's bread by the sweat of one's brow … The eternal flames of hell after suffering the death throes …

A mechanism admirably designed to leave the faithful no time for recollection and barely time to live.

Whatever you do, you're guilty, and you must confess.

If this mechanism had been set in motion cynically by a man or a group of men to ensure profit and power, it would show admirable intelligence and, as we say today, efficiency.

But no! I don't think so. That posits supermen.

At each stage someone really believed it … And the edifice was erected little by little.

The same goes for kingship, and also for the economic system.

The day when de Gaulle no longer believes he is de Gaulle, he will be locked up.

Napoleon at Saint Helena continued to believe he was Napoleon. He pestered his guards with ridiculous
demands, subjected his entourage to idiotic protocol, dictated a Memorial which defied good sense. As a result the English consider him one of the greatest men in History, and in Paris he occupies the insane mausoleum which he prepared for himself while still living.

What would have happened if he had had second thoughts, or rather if he had allowed his doubt to show?

He would have shared Hitler's fate, no doubt. And I'm not sure that Hitler will not one day be apotheosized.

It was Clérambault, I believe (I read Romain Rolland's book thirty years ago), who, when war was declared in 1914, read the mobilization posters without emotional reaction. He was ‘against'. Then a military band went by and he noticed that he was falling in step with the soldiers.

I've often had to resist. It's the easy solution. There are moments when non-commitment passes for treason and when all the world is against one.

Every ‘ideal' ends in a more or less fierce struggle against those who do not share it. Even religions have inspired massacres.

I feel myself nearer to the Cro-Magnon man than the man of the Renaissance, for whom life (the life of others, of course) counted so little. And even the Cro-Magnon man is too close. The cave paintings show us that man was already proud of killing – animals, to be sure, but still killing. One must go even further back.

A family of gorillas in a film gave me the deepest thrill, and I was not thinking of Darwin, I was struck by a sort of grave nobility.

No animal called wild has yet gone hunting in order to line up a large number of ‘trophies'
for pleasure.

Does one see a lion proudly aligning thirty or forty antelopes which it will not eat?

I know all this is trite, confused. The basic truths have been formulated time and again, and excellently. So well, indeed, that I mistrust them. All proverbs contradict each other. So do the Gospels, and the Church is so well aware of it that voluminous tomes try to prove that these contradictions aren't contradictions.

La Bruyère's
Les Caractères
, which are so admired, seem to me false because they try to condense the truth.

Intelligence explains all. Falsely. As if it were arithmetic.

I prefer to grope around a little idea until I
feel
some answer. But, if that more or less succeeds in my novels, I have the feeling here that I'm getting nowhere. More serious, I continue to seek for something without ever feeling satisfied.

No doubt I was wrong to begin this notebook, which risks infecting me with a passion for reflection. This would be catastrophic. It reassured me a bit that these pages are without importance and that I have the option of burning them.

It amuses me, though, to blacken them and to see them accumulate.

In my study again. It's the first time in my life that I've stayed in my study (I should say the first study where …) outside working hours. Is it age? Is it the study itself that seems really ‘mine'?