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Just as, deep down, I have trouble accepting Nietzsche’s phrase, even though I understand precisely what he means.

Just as I have trouble accepting that, somewhere, there is a unity, an identity of a superior nature.

Just as I have trouble, in short, in going without metaphysics.

In my defense, it must be said I’m not the only one. Even in Aragon I can find it, this belief in a unique, mysterious core from which all else stems. I can find it in his own answer to the question he and Breton posed in 1919; well, in what I have always taken to be his answer:

I know not what possesses me

And forces me to say aloud

Neither for pity, to redress me,

Nor as one might his sins avow

What haunts me, what obsesses me.*

So there you have it, the answer to your question. I don’t know. I don’t know any more than you do. But I do know there is something that cannot be compared to any project and that seems to me to be above desire.

On this point, I do not agree with you, because I remember reading, reading with a passion, long before I ever suffered the confusion of love (and I know that I will go on doing so long afterward, though that’s less amusing). Does this mean that I was already writing, I don’t mean compositions, I mean writing for me? In all honesty, I think the answer is yes, but I couldn’t swear to it; in any case I have not kept anything. But I was already reading with such absorption, such intensity, I reacted so powerfully to the words I found in books that I think I was already caught up in the system—that my fate was already sealed. We write because we have read, that seems obvious to me; it is, in a sense, a sort of conversation across the centuries. Except of course that Pascal or Dostoyevsky or Baudelaire is not going to rise from the grave to answer me. I know it, but do not know it; because I behave exactly as if they were about to do so. It goes without saying that we are never as rational as we think we are.

That it is a good life, a beautiful life, I confess, I have my doubts. What kind of life is it where you can’t walk three steps without taking a notebook? Where a couple of hours working on a text can leave you in a state of nervous exhaustion that requires several bottles of alcohol to get out of? I remember an interview with Patricia Highsmith where the interviewer asked what would happen to her writing if she fell in love again, fell hopelessly in love. She said nothing for a moment, then smiled, and said softly, “But there’s nothing to be done about that. Absolutely nothing.”

*Jean Orizet (born 1937) is a French poet and essayist. He co-founded the magazine Poésie 1 and the publishing house Les Éditions du Cherche Midi.

*Lionel Ray (born Robert Lorho, 1935) is a French poet and essayist.

†The pen name of André Imberechts (born 1940), a Belgian poet who won the Grand Prix de Poésie de l’Académie Française in 2007 for his life’s work.

*Ghérasim Luca is the pen name of the Romanian poet Salman Locker (1913–1994), a theorist of surrealism whom Gilles Deleuze called the greatest living French poet.

†An annual national poetry festival launched in 1999, involving some twelve thousand events across France each year.

‡Vincent Ravalec (born 1962) is a French novelist, essayist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film director.

*Houellebecq is referring to Alexei Nilych Kirillov in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed and to Maréchal General Hulot Comte de Forzheim in Balzac’s Cousin Bette.

*“Romain Gary ruse” and other references in these letters to Gary and to the pseudonym Émile Ajar refer to the fact that, late in life, Romain Gary embarked on a hugely successful second career using the nom de plume. Émile Ajar was awarded the Prix Goncourt for his “second” novel La Vie devant soi and Gary had his nephew Paul Pavlowitch pose as the author. (According to the rules, an author is precluded from winning the Prix Goncourt twice.) The actual identity of Émile Ajar was the subject of much speculation, but was not definitively