Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [118]
But we are further ahead, I think, as regards what characterizes and is specific to our visions of the world. Do you remember your first letter? “We have nothing in common, as the saying goes, except for one fundamental point we share—our contemptibleness …” etc. You opened fire back then, groping your way through the fog. But the truth is that we knew nothing about each other and certainly about what we did or didn’t have in common, whereas today … today, there’s this correspondence through which we’ve learned more.
What unites us: the animosity we inspire, that’s true; the intuition that allows us immediately to pick up the evil smell of a manhunt. But also (to stick to your last letter, which I believe sums things up nicely): the certainty that we will nevertheless triumph eventually; a joyous love of reading; the love of writers who are also readers of other people’s books; pessimism without rancor; the idea that happiness is the utopia of men who don’t believe in the unconscious; our liking for cinema; for literature turned up to the temperature of a God, as Nizan* said, and which is in any case primarily a continuation of speech through other means; Esbly (before); Baudelaire (forever).
What separates us: animals (I don’t like them); Nietzsche (whom I prefer to Schopenhauer, while the opposite appears to be the case for you); the matter of the Bentley (which I would have left as it was in the novel, because that’s how life is, absurd, contradictory, you forget that you sold the Bentley, you believe that you always were who you are now until you wake up one fine morning and notice that time has changed you); your concern, as you said, about sometimes “cooling down” the engine (there too I take the opposite view; the machine will cool down soon enough so in the meantime my advice is rather not to touch anything, to let it do its thing, roar, bolt away—isn’t it at these moments of overheating when you have the impression that it’s going too fast, too hard, that it’s in danger of exploding, isn’t that when the literary tool becomes like a hammer with a white-hot shaft hitting the finest sparks?); the use of drugs (I’m in favor); torpor (I’m against); our lovemaking preferences (I’ve no objection to doing it half asleep but, to return one confidence for another, I’m one of those people who prefer having their eyes open, their senses alert, being in that state of complete lucidity that you say is good only for balancing your checkbook and packing suitcases); literary technique (we’re in agreement of course on waiting for the moment when the book will pour out and almost write itself—except that for me that moment is not one where reason is eclipsed and dreams or thoughts from the depths take over but rather the opposite, where language and therefore, whether you like it or not, logic, meaning, once again lucidity, triumph over vagueness); the theory of the mirror (I did understand the image and I like your way of sending the imbeciles back to the empty two-way mirror they think they can hand you, but allow me to put forward another, loosely inspired by Spirit [of] the Life, a book by Chaim of Volozhin, a Lithuanian rabbi of the nineteenth century, which states in substance: What is the point of not exactly books but the Book? What is the point of the centuries spent in schools in the hairsplitting interpretation of the Law when nobody can have the last word? It is what prevents the world from collapsing, from falling into ruins and dust, because God created the world but immediately withdrew from it, abandoning it to itself and its self-destructive forces, so that only study, only letters of fire projected in columns toward the sky, can prevent it from undoing itself and keep it standing. In other words, the commentaries are not reflections but columns, in a world that without them would return to nothingness. Books are not a mirror but the girders of the universe, and that’s why