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'Yes, it is a mistake,' he said to himself decisively. He had wanted to write about himself. Well, he had nothing in common with the person he had been in 1935. His political indifference, his curiosity, his ambition, all that stubborn insistence on individualism — how quickly it passed, how foolish it was! It presupposed a future without obstacles, with guaranteed progress, the immediate brotherhood of man, and peace everlasting. Above all it presupposed selfishness and thoughtlessness. Oh, he would no doubt have been able to find excuses enough. But he was writing this book in order to try to tell the truth about his life, not to explain away its faults. 'It has to be written in the present,' he decided. He reread the last few pages. It was a pity to think that the past was going to be finally buried — his arrival in Paris, his first meetings with Dubreuilh, the trip to Djerba. 'I've lived them; that should be enough,' he said to himself. But if you take that position then the present is also enough, life itself is enough. And it obviously wasn't, for he had to write to feel himself completely alive. Too bad then. In any case you can't salvage everything. The question was to know what to say about himself, about himself today. 'How far have I come? What do I want?' If was funny — if you're so set on expressing yourself, it's because you feel you're unique. And he was not even able to say in what way he thought he was! 'Who am I?' He did not ask himself that question in the past; then it had always been the others who were defined, had limits. But not he. His books and life were still ahead of him. It enabled him to dismiss all adverse criticism, and from the heights of his future works to look on everyone, even Dubreuilh, with a little condescension. But now, he had to admit to himself that he was a mature man: young people treated him as an elder, adults as one of them, and some even treated him with respect. Mature, bounded, finite, himself and no one else, nothing but himself. But who was he? In a way, his books would ultimately decide; but on the other hand, he had to know the truth about himself in order to write them. At first sight, the meaning of those months he had just lived through was quite clear, but if you looked more closely everything became hazy. Helping people to think straight, to live better lives — was his heart really set on it, or was it only a humanitarian daydream? Was he really interested in what happened to others, or only in soothing his own conscience? And literature? What meaning did it now hold for him? There's nothing more abstract than wanting to write when you have nothing urgent to say. His pen hung motionless above the paper and he thought irritably that Paula was there behind him, watching him not write.
AH
'He's a monster,' Anne said. 'He'd work in the ruins of Hiroshima.'
'He is working in the ruins of Hiroshima.'
'Why not?' Dubreuilh asked. 'There have always been ruins somewhere.'
can't disagree
[thinking of lives on the left - the history of the left is a history of defeat]
[EDIT it's actually Left Hemisphere and the line is In the beginning was defeat lol. i misremembered everything]
He would meet her at ten o'clock. At about eleven they would go to the little hotel across the street from the paper. It was she who had insisted upon sleeping with him again after their return to Paris. There was some consolation at least in thinking that that arid day would, in a few hours, fade into a warm, pink night. Henri climbed into the car and started off in the direction of the paper. The night was still far off, and the afternoon would drag cheerlessly to its end. Listening to new jazz recordings, drinking with friends, smiling at women — yes, certainly, he would have enjoyed all that. But time was short; even now at the paper some people were ticking off the minutes. He would have liked to pull the car up along a quay, lean against the railing, watch the dappled water; or ride off into the gentle countryside surrounding Paris. He would have liked a great many things. But no. This year again the old stones of Paris would become covered with green without him. 'Never a breathing spell. Nothing exists but the future, a future which is always retreating. And that's what they call doing something!' Discussions, conferences — not a single one of those hours had been lived for itself. [...]
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'And what you're doing is no less a dismal farce,' Henri said. 'You want me to tell you something?' he added sharply. 'It's breaking your heart to think that all the adventure is over; you're just trying to prolong it. But good God! It wasn't the adventure that counted; it was the things we were defending.'
'Granted, we don't carry much weight,' Henri said. 'But at least we can speak out, defend our views, exert pressures ...'
'How well I remember!' Tournelle said bitterly. 'We wanted to save the honour of France so that she could speak to her allies with her head high. And there were people who got themselves slaughtered for that! A lot of blood spilled for nothing!'
'You're not going to tell me we shouldn't have resisted,' Henri said.
'I don't know. All I can say is that it didn't do us a hell of a lot of good!' Tournelle put his hand on Henri's shoulder. 'Don't repeat what I've said.'
Walking rapidly, he went through the corridors and crossed the courtyard. His heart was heavy. 'Poor das Viernas! Poor old men!' In his mind's eye, he saw their stiff collars, their derbies, that righteous anger in their eyes. 'France is our only hope,' they had said. But nowhere was there any hope, no more in France than anywhere else. He crossed the street and leaned against the railing of the quay. As seen from Portugal, France still shone with the stubborn glitter of a burnt-out star, and Henri had let himself be taken in by this. Suddenly he realized that he was living in the moribund capital of a very small country. The Seine was flowing in its bed; the Madeleine, the Chambre des Deputes were in their places, the Obelisk, too. One could easily have been led to believe that the war had miraculously spared Paris. 'That's what we wanted to believe,' Henri thought, turning the car into the Boulevard St Germain where the chestnut trees were faithfully blossoming. They had all let themselves be complacently fooled by those houses, those trees, those benches which so perfectly aped the past. But actually the once proud capital of the world had been utterly destroyed. Henri was nothing but an insignificant citizen of a fifth-rate power, and L'Espoir was a local sheet on the same level as a village weekly. Mournfully, he climbed the stairs to his office. France can't do anything for herself. Giving information to people who can do nothing, exciting their interest, arousing their indignation — what good could it do? He had written that series on Portugal with loving care, as if it could stir up public opinion from pole to pole. And Washington didn't give a damn, and the Quai d'Orsay was in no position to help. He sat down at his desk and reread the beginning of his article. What was the use? People would read it, nod their heads, throw the paper into a waste-basket, and that was it What difference did it make if L'Espoir remained independent or not, if it had more or fewer readers, or even if it went bankrupt? 'It isn't even worth the trouble to be stubborn over it!' Henri thought suddenly. Dubreuilh and Samazelle believed they, could make good use of the paper; they believed, too, that France, if she didn't remain isolated, still had an important role to play in the world. All hope was on their side; elsewhere, nothing but emptiness. 'Well? Why not ring and tell them I accept?' Henri said to himself. For a long moment he looked at the telephone on his desk. But his hand remained frozen. He went back to his article.
The fact was that with Lambert or Vincent he would not have tried to avoid the issue. Nadine needed help as much as they, but he had learned the hard way that coming to the aid of a woman always meant giving her a hold on him. They would somehow transform the least little token into an undying promise. He kept himself on the defensive.
'Spend the weekend with me.'
'But I can't,' he replied. Again a feeling of rancour rose in his throat; she was refusing him the body he so much wanted and was demanding his time, his attention ... 'You know I can't.'
'Because of Paula?'
'Exactly.'
'How can a man allow himself to be a slave the rest of his life to a woman he no longer loves?'
'I never told you I didn't care for Paula anymore.'
'You pity her and you feel guilty. It's nauseating, all that sentimental crap. When you don't enjoy seeing people any more, you let them drop, that's all.'
she is't wrong :/ but neither is he totally wrong to try to honor his commitment to her. what's awful is the in-between, the resentment he feels, the overflowing guilt
[...] They weren't the same streets. Then, they glittered with lights, they brightly streaked the capital of the world; today, the street lights shone far apart, and in their occasional light you noticed how narrow the streets were, how decrepit the houses, the City of Light had gone dark. If one day it should glitter again, the splendour of Paris would be that of other fallen world capitals — Venice, Prague, long-dead Bruges. Not the same streets, not the same world. Christmas Eve Henri had promised himself to put into words the sweetness of peace; but this peace was without sweetness. The streets were cheerless, Nadine's flesh grim; the springtime had nothing to offer him — the blue sky, the budding flowers obeying the season's routine, held no promise. Tell about the flavour of my life. But it no longer had any flavour because things no longer made sense. Yes, and that was why writing no longer made sense. Nadine was right about that, too. Those little lights along the Tagus — you can't enjoy describing them when you know they light a city dying of hunger. And starving people shouldn't serve as an excuse for writing. The past had been nothing but a mirage; the mirage vanished, what was left? Wretchedness, dangers, uncertain tasks, chaos. Henri had lost the world, had received nothing in return for it. He was nowhere, had nothing, was nothing; there was nothing he could speak about.
</3
For days on end I listened unflinchingly to the aggressive eulogies she showered on Joly. On her desk, Das Kapital lay open next to her chemistry book and her eyes wandered sadly from one volume to the other. She soon began examining all my acts and words in the light of historical materialism. There were quite a few beggars in the streets at the beginning of this cold springtime, and if I gave them a few sous she would say sneeringly, 'If you imagine that by giving that poor outcast a handout you'll change the face of the world ...'
'Oh, I'm not aiming so high. If it makes him happy, it's enough.'
'And you ease your conscience. Everybody wins.' She always attributed shabby motives to me. 'You think that by refusing to go out in the world and by being rude to people you're escaping your class. But you're just a shabbily dressed bourgeoise, that's all.'
lmao. classic nadine