Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [48]
Strangely enough, what struck me in your letter was that story of the stones “cast into the vacuum” and to which our freedom is to be compared, as well as the idea you draw from it, according to which we are temporary guests in this world, condemned sooner or later to “leave the room.”
The image is interesting.
It was used as you know by an entire Greek school of thought founded by Democritus and Epicurus.
It’s the image used after them by Lucretius, who really conceived the world as a hail of stones thrown into the vacuum along parallel trajectories with from time to time a “clinamen,” a minuscule deviation, a swerve that causes them to meet and through meeting to form bodies.
As a parenthesis, this is an image that fascinated a whole series of writers before yourself, from Ovid to Montaigne, Bossuet to Rimbaud and Lautréamont, who saw De rerum natura as an extraordinary, brilliant, and in the proper sense of the word a visionary book (“providens” is what Lucretius called it; Rimbaud translated it as “voyant,” seeing).
And, by way of another aside, it’s an image that stands up fairly well from a strictly scientific point of view, since there are serious people who some twenty centuries later continue to consider it valid: Marx and Engels, obviously, who saw Epicurus and Lucretius as major thinkers and regarded their theory of “clinamen,” this declination of linked atoms deviating slightly from their trajectory to form singular beings, like your stones and comets, as one of the sources of their dialectics. And, apart from them, real scientists like Darwin and Dmitri Mendeleev with his periodic table, researchers into chaos theory or fluid mechanics, the most specialized astrophysicists and naturally the discoverers of the electron, the proton, the nucleus, the atom, all agree that De rerum natura with its rainfalls of particles tumbling into the void, sometimes swerving from their trajectory and becoming unruly, was not too far from the truth.
I’ve no problem, then, with the image.
But there is one thing. It freaks me out and I’ll try to explain why.
Upon reflection—and in fact I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I received your letter—I think that there are several things about this image (and the philosophy that goes with it) that I find troubling.
First, the thing about the vacuum through which the atoms tumble. That would make anyone dizzy.
Second, the fact that in this vacuum, this endless, bottomless abyss, stones hit each other, jostle, bounce off each other in a whirl that oscillates between Villon’s ballad of the hanged, the jig of the tortured in Dante’s circles of hell, and the falling bodies on September eleventh of those who threw themselves from the tops of the towers … I don’t find it exactly a cheerful prospect.
Third, in this tumbling there’s no way back, no possible backward zoom, no way of catching up. Yes, there’s the clinamen, the deviations from the trajectory. That’s all well and good, but these deviations, as if by chance, all go in the same direction, that is, downward. To quote Lucretius, he says that no body can extract itself from gravity and rise by its own force. He explains that even bodies such as flames, which give the impression that they rise, are only illusions and soon fall down. Once you start falling, he insists, there’s no stopping it, all you can do is drop and keep dropping. This is no longer entropy. It’s Carnot* writ large. It’s not sliding, it’s sinking, collapsing, guaranteed 100 percent. There is absolutely no chance of the opposite possibility. It doesn’t even allow the hypothesis of a nanosecond in which you might right the helm, enjoy a moment’s respite, glide. Damn!
Fourth,