French poet and novelist (1908–1944)
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You see,” Totochabo pointed out to me, “I’m as fed up with all this as you are. I shall now devise a way of shutting him up with a spot of sham erudition.”
Raising his voice, he went on:
“If it’s half-wits you want, you’d better go and look for them somewhere else, for we know jolly well that beneath the perceptible form of sound is hidden a silent essence. It is from this, this crucial point at which the kernel of the perceptible has yet to choose to be sound or light or something else, from this hinterland of nature where to see is to see sound and to hear is to hear suns, it is from this very essence that sound draws its power and its ordering force.”
And with a wink in my direction, he whispered:
“That should silence them, wouldn’t you say?”
“For good,” I replied. “But when you say sham erudition, do you mean real knowledge?”
“My poor fellow,” he said, “how very thirsty you are!”
It was true and I set about treating my condition.
To reach the summit, one must proceed from encampment to encampment. But before setting out for the next refuge, one must prepare those coming after to occupy the place one is leaving. Only after having prepared them can one go on up. That is why, before setting out for a new refuge, we had to go back down in order to pass on our knowledge to other seekers...
He questioned us one after the other. Each one of his questions — all of them very simple: Who were we? Why had we come? — caught us completely off our guard and seemed to probe our very insides. Who are you? Who am I? We could not answer him as we could a police official or a customs inspector. Give one's name and profession? What does that mean? But *who* are you? And *what* are you? The words we uttered — we had none better — were worthless, repugnant and grotesque as dead things. We realized that with the guides of Mount Analogue, we could no longer get away with just words.
"It was at that moment that I called in a few of the top Fidgeters who, under my directions, set about organizing the destruction of the young. The method is quite straightforward; the children are taken at the time when their intelligence is not yet fully developed, and their passions respond to the slightest stimulation; they are made to live in companies, dressed and armed uniformly, and by means of magic speeches and collective physical exercises, whose secret is ours alone, we give them what we call "the cult of the common ideal"; this is an absolute devotion to a loud-mouthed, authoritarian person, or to a particular form of dress, or to some catch phrase, or to a certain grouping of colors, or whatever. All we need then is to have here two opposing groups of young people (or more than two, but an even number is preferable) who have been kept at a high level of emotional tension; the sole precaution to take is to leave no time for their brains to function, but that's easy enough. Then (are you with me?) when they have reached just the right pitch, they are let loose on one another...and afterwards, we can breathe easy for a while. This, at the same time, occupies and enriches the manufacturers and sellers of uniforms and armaments, and the authors of tracts which recommend the uses of carnage, one of whom wrote recently: "The young man who is not killed in the flower of youth is not a young man, he is the old man of tomorrow.
I am dead because I lack desire;
I lack desire because I think I possess;
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
Seeing you have nothing, you try to give of
yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are
nothing;
Seeing you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live.
Vol. 2, Essais et Notes