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I borrow them, the way in the old times you would leave an exhausted horse at a coaching inn and get on another one to take you for the next stage (Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze said something of the sort in a discussion published forty years ago in the journal L’Arc).†

Therefore, in reply to the famous question of the “mental point” from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the present, etc., would no longer be perceived as contradictory, etc., I take it for granted that for a writer the reply is never rhetorical (verse or prose, poetry or novel …) but is a question of diet (what is good at this moment for this body who writes and the body of the writing, which is also a living, growing body?) or even metaphysical (since truth is a being in movement and not only has the right but the obligation to switch from one genre to another according to the needs of its trajectory).

There is no “mental point” other than the mind.

No other light for a work than that of which Proust said, in relation to Vinteuil and his sonata, that even if it were refracted through different surroundings, it would remain the same monotone light.

The literary odyssey has no center other than the ego that surrenders to it, gets drunk on it, and naturally often loses itself in it.

When I say the “ego,” clearly I don’t mean His Royal Highness with its narcissism, its mirror, its store of stratagems and secrets. I’m thinking of this highly unstable, improbable, fragile, sometimes tiny ego that is nothing more than the subject of the literary adventure, its real “cruel theater,” the agent of its construction and deconstruction. I’m thinking of an ego that has become a mere place, sometimes a point, which inflates, empties, swells in time with the work and disappears when the work is finished. Didn’t I tell you that I hardly retain anything about Baudelaire, Piero, Angola’s cities, Sartre since I wrote of them? And haven’t we both had the experience of books that changed us and whose only interest lies in that?

Dear Michel, that’s what I think.

That’s why I believe that you will write more poetry and I’ll write another novel.

That’s why you made a film, a very good film, very poetic and metaphysical (bless Arte for having managed in the end to screen it!), which is first and foremost—I must say it again—another zigzag on the road where you scatter and snare your pursuers.

I also wanted to reply to what you said about actresses: one, in any case, for whom I can do no better than to apply Baudelaire’s dictum: “my great, my single, my original passion.”

I wanted to reply too about Gary, that other writer/filmmaker and master, if ever there was one, in the art of snares and hooks: what an odd idea, that concept of the duties we supposedly have toward our readers getting in the way of Operation Ajar!*

Maybe next time.

For the moment, I’ll send you this.

*Don Juan’s valet in Molière’s play Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre.

*Bérénice and Paul Denis: characters in Louis Aragon’s novel Aurélien. The suggestion here is that they may have been inspired by René Crevel, a French writer involved with the Surrealist and communist movements who committed suicide in 1935, and Denise Lévy, a cousin of André Breton’s wife.

†German politician active in both Germany and France, known as “Danny the Red,” currently copresident of the European Greens–European Free Alliance in the European Parliament.

*Baudelaire and Hugo had an odd relationship, both lurching between admiration and hostility toward each other’s work. Baudelaire criticized Hugo’s bombast and romanticism, while Hugo disapproved of Baudelaire’s “decadence.” Lévy sees Hugo’s apparent compliment to Baudelaire, when he famously congratulated him on having created a “frisson nouveau” (translated here as “new thrill”), as rather condescending. “The black prince of Kamchatka” refers to Baudelaire himself—“black” because he was seen as a Satanic poet, while Kamchatka, a peninsula in far east Russia, like Timbuktu, conjures