Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [78]
What is new is the obscene way they go about it these days. The incredible lack of tact, of humanity. For example, I can’t bear the smug way the journalist Demonpion, when he’s called on, professes to be an expert on the subject of me. It’s like vomit, I can’t deal with it, I don’t have the stomach.
By comparison, I can tolerate the sight of blood; and of hatred. Maybe not having had a mother makes you stronger, but if so, it does it in a way you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. You never take love for granted; to be honest, you find it difficult to believe in love at all. You remain a sort of feral child; never completely at peace, never completely domesticated; always ready to bite.
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Never having had a mother? At least I knew she existed; I could situate her genealogically speaking (even if, most of the time, I didn’t know where she was geographically). My sister saw even less of her than I did; to her, our mother was an almost ghostly presence. But it’s striking to note that even children who have lived their whole lives with adoptive parents, often in happy homes, still feel the need (usually late in their teens) to find their “real” parents.
When asked, they all say that they “need to know.” Need to know what? A few of them are happy to know the genealogy, to have a few brief biographical details. But most of them, if it is a possibility, want to meet up with their parents.
There are the pathetic ones who have an idealized image of their parents, who imagine they are going to find a princess (this usually happens when the adoptive home was not a happy one). But most of them are clear-sighted; they realize that someone who abandoned them like an old piece of furniture is unlikely to be a particularly admirable human being. They expect, quite reasonably, that they may encounter a human wreck or a complete shit. And still they desperately want to meet this person, they track them down, often expending considerable effort in the process.
It rarely results in a long-term relationship. Often, they’re happy to meet up just once. A few hours to make up for a whole life. What happens during those few hours is obviously a great mystery; one that, it seems to me, I am better placed than most to imagine.
Curiously, they hardly ever feel hatred; no, what’s at stake is something colder, something sadder.
Nor is there any forgiveness, and I confess that I take exception to hearing my mother say, “We should all forgive each other,” and so on, when she comes on like Dostoyevsky at his most infuriating. To me, it’s just another sham, and a cruel one at that.
What is at stake is recognizing that a wrong has been committed, a wrong whose consequences are still spreading like ripples. It is the recognition, too, that this wrong is permanent, that what is done cannot be undone. Finally, it is the recognition that the wrong is limited; it is the transformation of a limitless, ignoble wrong into one limited in space and time. It is an attempt to halt the indefinite uncoiling of causal chains, the endless propagation of misery and evil.
Some go a step further: they attempt to define themselves in terms of the wrong done to them; they use their unfit parent as an anti–role model. Some go much, much further, and I know that my sister (I hope she will forgive me for citing her) went so far as to refuse to work so she could devote herself to her vocation as a housewife and mother; and I know that she did so successfully. One in a thousand, maybe, might succeed; but there is nothing inevitable about it. It is possible to break the chain of suffering and evil.
But everyone, even those who do not have this strength, learns a great lesson from their encounter. It is, in a sense, the dark face of the