Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them. - Paul Valéry

For the musician, before he has begun his work, all is in readiness so that the operation of his creative spirit may find, right from the start, the appropriate matter and means, without any possibility of error. He will not have to make this matter and means submit to any modification; he need only assemble elements which are clearly defined and ready-made. But in how different a situation is the poet! Before him is ordinary language, this aggregate of means which are not suited to his purpose, not made for him. There have not been physicians to determine the relationships of these means for him; there have not been constructors of scales; no diapason, no metronome, no certitude of this kind. He has nothing but the coarse instrument of the dictionary and the grammar. Moreover, he must address himself not to a special and unique sense like hearing, which the musician bends to his will, and which is, besides, the organ par excellence of expectation and attention; but rather to a general and diffused expectation, and he does so through a language which is a very odd mixture of incoherent stimuli.

This character out of my fantasy, whose author I became in the days of my partly literary, partly solitary or . . inward youth, has lived, apparently, since that faded time with a certain life — which his reticence, more than what he said, has persuaded a few readers to attribute to him. Teste was conceived — in a room where Auguste Comte spent his early years — at a period when I was drunk on my own will and subject to strange excesses of consciousness of my self. I was suffering from the acute ailment called precision. I tended toward the extreme of the reckless desire to understand, and I searched in myself for the critical points in my powers of attention.

Allez! Tout fuit! Ma présence est poreuse, La sainte impatience meurt aussi!