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By Root 812 0

of these two passions is not at all surprising. I believe that they come down to the same thing. Deep down, fundamentally, they are the same thing, the same kind of energy, the same drive, the same force—reined in, building up—the same mix of sensual pleasure and pain, suddenness and patience, scrupulous searching and effortless finding. Why do you write? Because you can’t make love all day. Why do you make love? Because you can’t write all day. When and in what circumstances could you give up writing? On the day—if it happens—that the other passion, that other fervor, shows signs of abating. Would the opposite be true? Would the same correlation apply in reverse? Of course. These things always cut both ways. What can a body do? asked Nietzsche. What can it do, what does it want, and in the name of what overriding interest? It can do all sorts of things. I’m not like Beckett, who, to the same question, “Why do you write?,” replied half a century later with his famous “It’s all I’m fit for.” If I will it to, my body can do any number of things that are apparently unrelated to my two essential passions. It can work, for example. It can move from one place to another, heal, sustain itself, live somewhere, sleep, do battle, make noise, toss and turn. But my nature is such that all these activities serve only to underpin one or the other of my two essential passions. My constitution allows me to do practically nothing that is not in some way or another, directly or indirectly, linked to these arts of loving and writing, the double climax that I derive almost equally from both. Truly, there are only two things that my body is “able” to do, in the sense of being equipped by nature to do; two things that are really one and the same; loving and writing, writing and loving, drawing sustenance from the first for the second and tapping in the second the wellspring of the first. That’s how it is.

That this passion for writing should occupy the position I’ve mentioned in someone’s life, that it should outclass others, all others with the exception of love, with which it competes or of which it forms a part, derives from a neurosis, which is also quite a banal one—see the irrevocable demonstration given by Sartre in The Words, which is really his farewell to books, a cry of hatred and revolt against bewitchment by literature. Except that first off, I like that bewitchment. I don’t dream of freeing myself from it. And why would I? In the name of what? I repeat, I have no substitute passion. I don’t have a third passion to put in its place … Besides, this exasperated quixotism, this passion for words and their echo, this life within and through words, this way of literally seeing the word as the beginning of the world, takes in my case—and this is nothing to be proud of … once again, that’s just how it is, neither good nor bad, it is what it is—extreme forms verging on the burlesque.

Ideas … I haven’t written any novels in twenty years and thus, unlike you, I’m a man of ideas and should see ideas as the ultimate rulers. But the more time passes, the more sure I am that even when it comes to questions of truth and ideas, what is decisive are words. It is believed that a philosopher is someone who says, “Look, I have an idea, all I need now are the words to express it.” Not at all! Experience, my experience, has proved that it’s almost always the opposite. It’s words that ignite concepts and not the other way around. The shaft of light thrown by the work of words is the bright spot in the dark that finally nails down the idea.

As for life, I’m not bad at it. I’m not melancholic or depressive, still less a depressionist. But the fact is, the further I go into it, the more life, its joys, its everyday happiness, its meetings, interest me only insofar as they will or can be transmuted into words (not necessarily right away but one day in one form or another, perhaps in a novel, perhaps in a film or in my false novel, the diary I’ve been keeping for more than thirty years and that I’m sure I’ll get into some shape or another one day). It was