Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [54]
I happened to be in Paris to promote this film you haven’t managed to get to see when I got your letter. After a moment of panic, my first reaction—symptomatic—was to rush to a bookshop and get a copy of Pascal’s Pensées.
But first I have to tell you about the language course I took in Germany. No, no, I’m not trying to sidestep or evade the subject; in fact, I am just putting it back in its context.
At the age of fifteen I was, surprising though it may seem, a pretty well-adjusted teenager. My education at the Lycée de Meaux was going peacefully (after a disastrous start when I stupidly drew attention to myself by getting ridiculously high marks, I quickly worked out that, to be popular with my classmates, I had to temper my enthusiasm; I therefore did very little work, got acceptable results, and easily graduated from one year to the next). I didn’t smoke, I had never touched a drop of alcohol. I was even, to some extent, sporty. (Several times staying with my father on holiday, I cycled up to the Col de l’Iseran, half a mile above Val d’Isère, and I scored a number of fine goals for my school football team.) I was listening to cool and trippy music like Pink Floyd. Girls, for the most part, found me cute. Of course, there were a number of worrying signs (prematurely reading Baudelaire, a chronic inability to watch animals suffer), but very few, to be honest.
My grandparents and I probably imagined Germany to be a country constantly shrouded in winter mists, so I set off wearing an anorak, suitcase full of heavy sweaters and thick socks; I think I even had a woolly hat and mittens. In fact, it can be really hot in Bavaria in the summer (and the course was held in Traunstein, in southern Bavaria, practically in Austria).
This was not only my first time in Germany; it was the first time I had ever been abroad.
That summer the weather was exceptional. One radiant sunny day was followed by another just as radiant and sunny. After a morning spent studying German, we had our afternoons free. We could cycle through the half-empty streets of the little town or meet up in the shade of the trees in the park, lie on the grass, or swim in the Chiemsee, which was close by. And the young German girls were—how can I put it?—not very shy.
The upshot: I spent most of the trip, which could have been idyllic, holed up in my room devouring Pascal’s Pensées.
This, I am aware, may seem surprising, but adolescence as we know is a dangerous and turbulent period; some teenagers spend their afternoons alone in their bedroom listening to heavy metal (and in the worst-case scenario then go out and shoot twenty of their schoolmates with an automatic weapon). And Pascal, if one takes into context the original violence of his writings, can produce a greater shock to the system than even the heaviest of heavy metal groups. The famous phrase “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me” is too well known and has lost its impact, but it must be remembered that I was reading it for the first time, with no safeguards, no advance warnings, and I took it full in the face. The terror of infinite, empty space into which one tumbles for all eternity. Pure terror. Let’s take fragment 199.
“Imagine a number of men in chains, all condemned to death, some of whom are daily slaughtered in the sight of the others; and those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, looking at each other in distress and despair, await their turn. This is an image of the condition of men.”
It goes without saying that there must have been some