J. M. Le Clézio - Terra Amata

There’ll be this world shut up, hidden, inside the black and white parallelepiped, this sort of tyrannical paradise of language which will really have been the truth at least once in the universe. Perhaps this separate world is odious, or terrible. The programme of a few hours in a life, of a few spasms of a civilization. Everywhere, all over the world, other books have been opened, then shut. The agitation of the life contained in them will not have overflowed its frontiers. Thought and deed remain. What fades is the communicating link that existed for a moment with the reader. And it is you who by turning the last fatal page have unwittingly killed the adventure. Homer is dead, Dante and Dostoievsky and Pirandello are dead, and it’s you who wiped them out each time; who thrust them a little deeper each time into the inexorable mud, trampled and crushed with every speck of dust under your leaden soles. Every time you’ve said law, happiness, space, year, love, it was so many knife-thrusts into the flesh of man. Every time you’ve moved, every time you’ve swallowed an aspirin with a glass of cold water, every time you’ve bought a piece of meat at the butcher’s, you’ve taken something away from that abolished world. All the novels and poems and films and pictures that you created without thinking, simply by being alive, only served to efface those other works that were their real flesh and blood.

But books are not eternal. A mere trifle, a few flames, a bit of quicklime, an open dustbin, or just being forgotten, and a book is dead. The ragmen go through the streets every evening, their singsong cry always asking for paper and yet more paper. Here the book props up the leg of a wardrobe, there it stops up a broken window. It hangs from a nail in the bogs of bug-ridden hotels, and everyone tears off a handful of pages full of strange life. Take your revenge while there’s still time. Learn to hate the words of others, culture, and the faceted mirror of intelligence; otherwise there is no peace. My eyes are at war with yours, my bones and organs have no worse enemies than those other bodies that resemble them. Exercise your muscles and learn to tear books apart with your bare hands, first two, then three or four or five at a time. Don’t stop until the ground’s strewn with confetti with a mutilated letter on each piece. Then scatter the little bits of coloured paper in the wind, and see how the novel flutters back to the matter it betrayed!

You’re in a fast train, and each echoing jolt of the steel wheels jerks out a new thought. In the hot stifling air, or in the buzz of the aircraft cabin, thought flies, and the earth moves slowly, crushed by the thousands of yards of distance; they are words, sentences, ideas. In the dusty street a dog sleeps in the sun with its mouth open, amid a forest of human legs. That is a poem. The rain drips down on the roofs, windscreen-wipers moan back and forth. A curved poem, based on the earth, a poem with a living womb. Starving children look up with bloodshot eyes like stupid jewels in their great dwarfs’ heads. A poem transparent and immediate, deep as the wind, airy as light, huge as the great dirty lake. Or a toothless old woman leans against the wall and stares uncomprehendingly. A soldier kneels in the mud, and the blood runs slowly from his mouth. It is always the same unwritten poem, the story that is hummed under the breath, or dreamed. Everywhere around me, and around you too, everyone reads these strange yet close words, they write them with their gestures, and mark them down with their bodies and their desires.

On the closed book, closed or almost closed, the tide of the world breaks and pounds unceasingly. What is inside it matters less, after all, than what is outside. What is one day’s reading in a lifetime? What is one line of writing among all the endless scribbling that fills the world? There is not just one word, one sun, one civilization. There are millions of things everywhere. Isn’t the poem there, or there, or in your eye, the eye of the beholder?

I didn’t really write what you’ve just read. How can one bear witness? I am only an actor who doesn’t know the play he’s acting in. What I’ve done I’ve done by chance, like a gnat in a strong wind. I’ve said first one thing, then another. I’ve written pins, tobacco, passions, suffer, nylon, seed. You’ve read zip-fastener, top, beauty, woman, cigarette, cloud. And accurate chance is now in motion, each speck descending into the machine along its own individual path. But I’ve said enough. Now it’s your turn.