there is life and there is a greater life and that although the first may seem futile, although at the end nothing of you or your projects will remain, the second and only the second, that greater life, means that a person’s life was worth living. The greater life … The expression comes from Malraux. But it’s also used by Malebranche* when he explains in one of his Letters to Dortous from Mairan that man is only great “through his relations with great things.” I like that expression, the idea that for each person there’s the possibility of a greater or lesser life. I like—and don’t care whether this seems antiquated, useless, incomprehensible to certain people—this possibility of being a little greater than yourself. (The image is still from Malraux, in the second-last section of the Antimémoires, where he has Clappique meet an older Méry, who only has a few weeks to live but who is nevertheless “too tall for his height.”) I like the thought that you can raise yourself above yourself, above your height and the destiny you were given. And I don’t mind this being done, if necessary, by perching on top of major events or, when needed, on minuscule events such as those wars without names, archives, or a history that have so often spurred me to action. We’re all more or less guided by a star, aren’t we? Well, there are bad stars—which the Romans called sidera, whose property is to attract you toward the depths, the chasm, the abyss, and first and foremost the abyss in yourself: the vertigo of introspection—rather than being star-struck, being struck down by the intimacy my father was so afraid of, and the mistrust of which I inherited. There are the good stars, the astra, which, on the other hand, make you raise your head, look to the sky, especially the sky of ideas: there’s the star of the sailors of the Île de Sein and the humble fishermen of Brest and Saint-Malo immediately joining the Free French; the idée fixe that, despite the shooting and the slaughter, made the inspired soldiers of Monte Cassino rise to the assault, the light guiding the first French pilots in the Battle of Britain through the night as they resisted the fascination—again, starstruck—of what de Gaulle called “the frightening void of general renunciation.” I’m nostalgic for that. Like all my generation, I miss those stars whose heat reaches us now only from very far away, almost abstractly, and yet were the best thing about the (last) century. And ultimately it’s this too, this unparalleled heroism, these true legends, myths of flesh and thought, these living examples, all the more alive for appearing unreal, that have me running around.
So you see that we don’t always break with the law or with our mimicry of the father …
*Leonid Plyushch: Russian mathematician held by Soviet authorities in a psychiatric hospital. He was released in 1976 as a result of an international petition initiated by the French mathematician Henri Cartan.
†Gosplan: Soviet State Planning Committee, the central board that supervised various aspects of the Soviet Union’s planned economy.
*Russian journalist and human rights activist who was assassinated in 2006 after writing Putin’s Russia and opposing the Chechen conflict.
*Emmanuel Levinas: a Lithuanian-born philosopher and Talmudic scholar who became a leading French thinker in the 1950s and developed “the ethics of the Other.”
*Éditions Grasset, a major French publishing house.
*Italian member of a violent left-wing group during the so-called Years of Lead in Italy, which lasted from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, characterized by widespread social conflict and acts of terrorism by both right-wing and left-wing paramilitary groups. Battisti fled to France to avoid a life sentence, and later to Brazil when a change in French law would have led to his extradition to Italy. He remains in Brazil, where he has been granted political refugee status.
*Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715): French philosopher and physicist. A Cartesian and opponent of the British empiricists, he was also a devout Christian who sought