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By Root 810 0

on my acts and gestures or to say a few words about a page in one of my books, to send me a laundry note, a four-leaf clover, or an article she had cut out. (Once, on my return from a vacation, and already cursing the pile-up of thirty or forty letters that would be waiting for me as at the end of every year, one for each day, I didn’t find a single one. A little later, I learned in a message from someone close to her that she was dead. And that death of someone I had never seen, whose first name I hardly knew, the only thing about whom I knew was their written voice, got me down as much as the death of a friend.)

And since you mentioned the Internet, isn’t there for you as much as for me an entire region of the blogosphere that refutes the unkind image of those who see in it the world’s garbage can? There’s the Australian blogger who sent me a quasi-thesis on my Baudelaire that I wrote twenty years ago. Or those students at Hofstra University, on Long Island, who, with their professor, have been keeping an archive of all my speeches that for decades have been cast to the four winds. Or the Chinese guy who kept the notes of the seminars I gave on April 12, 1986, at the Institute of Foreign Languages in Beijing and who woke up today to discuss them on an equal footing. That fan of Romain Gary who listed the occurrences of his name in my texts. That defender of Sarajevo under siege who recognized himself in a shot of Bosna!* and then began to read my works … That unknown community of allies who have appeared from nowhere and everywhere, those friends who save our lives, that little army of light and shade, reading a line here and there and then another and another. And in the end it all adds up, and I can assure you that it outweighs the pile of shit that our enemies would like to bury us under. It too can give us courage, can restore our confidence. And it’s the ultimate reason for the responsibility we have, you as much as I, not to stay alive but to win. War again. Chess. I don’t know how you see it, and yet …

So there you go, Michel. I realize that, despite having said so much, I didn’t reply to your question about evil, its philosophy, its coils, and how we can escape getting stuck in the wrong track. (If I had, I would have told you first that I don’t believe it’s possible to “break the unlimited chain of the causes and effects of evil” and second that, instead of using your image of the coils, I prefer that of the Möbius strip where, even if you have the impression that you’re getting away and rising, you never escape from the surface, the plane, the continuity of evil. Third, what’s at stake is not to “undo” evil but to “make do” with it and to limit its power—all propositions to which I may return the next time.) But I felt like telling you these little things without losing any time. Perhaps I’m naïve or overemotional. But there was a tone in your letter and especially a couple of words that made my blood turn cold, and that’s why I wanted to reply right away. There’s no reason to be afraid. I really believe that. You know the story of Hobbes, don’t you? Do you know the joke that all-round champion used to make to his friends about fear and its effects? That unrivaled theoretician of fear, the man who founded his theory not only of states but also of societies on it, said that he believed his affinity with fear came from the fact that his mother had given birth to him prematurely as the result of a shock. So you see, another story about a mother. Really, there’s no getting away from it … But there’s no reason to be afraid of our mothers, or of fear itself.

*“Entartage”: peculiar practice that has become a part of French public life and has led to the coining of this new word. It consists of throwing a pie into the face of a well-known personality. Under common law this would probably constitute an assault or at least battery, but in France it is the source of endless raucous laughter.

*Georges Bernanos, a French author and ardent Catholic, initially supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War but became disillusioned