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Just the same, the fact is, in the end we forget even our own books. And I don’t know why, but this morning, I find that really comforting.

July 11, 2008

Really? I don’t know. I see what you mean. But I’m not sure I find the idea that comforting. Maybe because of what I have told you on several occasions about my fanatical passion for lucidity. Maybe also because I once experienced for a few hours, I mean really experienced what it is for anyone—and it’s even worse for a writer—to have their own memory clinically erased. Salpêtrière* … the whole accident and emergency drill … stupidity … stupor, suddenly hardly remembering your own name, being able only to repeat in a loop before the group of doctors, all aghast, “Baudelaire’s illness … Baudelaire’s illness …”

So maybe you’re right and perhaps it’s inevitable that one day or another the moment will come when those great chapters of life, of books, grow to resemble pale shadows or mirages or billowing clouds of warmth dissipated by the end of a wonderful, vivid now. But unlike for you, there’s nothing that terrifies me more than that prospect. And faced with that fear, that loss, that enforced coming apart, that leaching, I for my part tend to train myself to become an athlete of memory, a puny but tenacious Hercules who either carries his precious images in his arm or pushes them ahead of him, without rest, like a heavy, compact, reassuring boulder that’s always head-on.

Sometimes it’s exhausting. Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, even believed that we die of this and that it’s the most precise definition of that morbid state par excellence that he called ressentiment. No matter. It’s what helps me move forward. It’s what gives me a sense of time that is not dead time, time that slips through your fingers, or, which comes to the same thing, an eternal present. And to return one last time to the only one of our debates that left me with a taste of insincerity, it’s the most serious reason I know for bolstering up one’s desire to write and, come what may, to go on.

I don’t like all my books equally, of course. Or all the moments of my life. But I like the idea of being answerable for them. And I particularly like the thought that each new sequence is a mute but imperious and joyful interrogation of the preceding ones. Contrary to the famous theory, I don’t believe that it’s at the last moment, the last breath, that you rediscover the total memory, fully available to itself, that life has dispersed. I believe it’s here and now, at every moment of life, as long as it is really lived. On each page of each book, as long as it is intensely desired. And my premonition, if I had one, would be rather that it’s time to start worrying when in reply to the question “What is living?” too many of those books, moments in life, or the faces that accompanied them stop answering the roll call. There’s a feeling in return for a feeling, a wager for a wager.

Let’s wait and see.

*Historical hospital in Paris, previously focused on neurology, now a general and teaching hospital covering most major medical areas.

Glossary of Letters

Letter of January 26, 2008

In which Michel Houellebecq opens hostilities: “Together, we perfectly exemplify the shocking dumbing-down of French culture and intellect.”

Letter of January 27, 2008

In which Bernard-Henri Lévy responds and brings up the lynching, by their contemporaries, of Sartre, Cocteau, Pound, Camus, and Baudelaire.

Letter of February 2, 2008

In which Michel Houellebecq examines Schopenhauer to divide a writer’s motives into the desires to please, to irritate, and to conquer.

Letter of February 4, 2008

In which Bernard-Henri Lévy, immersing himself in memories of childhood, resuscitates the ghost of a little scapegoat whose destiny was to illustrate and continue the theories of Girard and Clausewitz.

Letter of February 8, 2008

Social self? Innermost self? Some rules to follow in case of prolonged exposure to postpolitical