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By Root 824 0

for the reasons I’ve already given, as soon as I realized it was possible (which is to say sometime around September 10, 1998). Perhaps, had I been rich, I would have wanted fame as well; but that is not the way things went in my life. I became famous in September 1998; I became rich in May 1999 when the royalties arrived. Well, I say rich, it’s all relative. Let’s say, rich enough to be able to think about giving up a job that simply paid the rent—but that, in any case, always seemed to me the only meaningful benefit of being rich.

The fact remains that, now, we have fame. And that we cannot easily get away from it. Even less so on my part since, unlike you perhaps, I have never felt the least temptation to try the Romain Gary ruse.* I don’t know why, to be honest; I think I would feel I was disowning myself, disowning my previous writings. I know some artists have done so.; but in those cases I think it was a genuine disavowal. Stupid maybe, or at least that is how it sometimes appears from the outside after a few centuries have passed; but at the time, from their point of view, entirely genuine.

There is also the fact that I have, over the years, established with my readers a relationship of trust (and that those readers, whether or not I know them, are the only people in the world to whom I feel a certain duty). I would feel, I don’t know, as though I were betraying that trust. And, in betraying that trust, I would feel that I was giving in to the pack.

And I do not want to do that. No, I do not want that.

So, there you have it; I will have to put up with being Houellebecq to the end, with all that that entails. Of course, the whole thing might be over the day after tomorrow; but let’s leave that hypothesis to one side.

It is true that there are those who have succeeded. Yes, yes, I’ve finally found something positive to say, it’s taken a bit of time, but I’ve found something! Certain poets, some of the greatest, have managed to survive a substantial dose of celebrity; and managed to produce, in the throes of that fame, some of their most beautiful poems.

Well, when I say “certain poets,” the only name that really springs to mind is Victor Hugo.

Maybe Aragon, too, but I wonder: Are Aragon’s later works really as good as his early work? I don’t know, I’d have to look into it; but in the case of Victor Hugo, it’s certain.

So, how to become Victor Hugo? How does one develop that inner strength? This will make you smile, but I have managed to derive a certain comfort from the fact that, like Victor Hugo, I was born on February 26 …

(The analogy, I admit, stops there. In the famous poem “This Century Was Two Years Old” in which he talks about himself, he describes himself a few lines later as “Abandoned by all, save by his mother.”)

(And I suspect I’m off to a bad start when it comes to the state funeral.)

You have every right to smile—here I am, prepared to drift into the consolations of astrology, to believe in auguries and omens, when ever since we began writing these letters I have been posing as a rationalist, a freethinker … But maybe that is precisely my mistake. After all, Victor Hugo, after his daughter’s death, went through a terrible period of depression; what if it was spiritualism that brought him through it?

Maybe it is time for me, too, to say my “farewell to reason.” Reason, which has been useless to me, which has never helped me write a single line; reason, which, all my life, has done nothing but torment me with the desolate nature of its conclusions.

And whether I say my “farewell to reason” in the manner of Pascal or of Hölderlin makes little difference. As long as I do not do so in the manner of Nerval or Kleist.

It was Nietzsche, I think, before he said his own farewell, who suggested that in the future, man should have two brains, one for science, one for all the rest.

The rest to include art, and love as well.

It would also include, if I understand you correctly, philosophy as an exceptional case within literature.

It’s strange how hard I find it to give up the illusion that there