Since I was a boy, I began experiencing the great limit of that wonderful conquest we call language, as some feelings become too immense to make it useless, and even profane.
And it has always been into that limit that we build up our existence, sometimes with too many explanations for simple things, sometimes pretending simplicity just to get superficiality. Too often used by the erudite to entrap the uneducated.
Then, I started to remember all things past. I saw my mother rummaging through her needlework bag, as my father was reading the newspaper, and he’d laugh and then look concerned, he approved and then frowned. Yes, my past gone.
I lifted up the book I chose to read from the sofa where I had laid it, The Goddess and the Child, than I stared at my glass. The wine was burgundy red, and it looked like it was softly swinging, rocking like a light sea inside the glass that laps over the rocks on the shore. I grasped it with my hands, and soon the perfume of deep summer nights came over me, like when the aroma from the vines is drawn to the coast. I took a sip, and my mind floated away again, into those charming spring evenings, when the days are getting longer, and my father would tell me about the way the world was changing as I got home. I would often try to avoid listening to him. Yes, my past gone.
I thought and then remembered a funny adage from Aristophanes, “Quickly bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may whet my mind and say something clever”, and I start tittering.
Yet again, my past gone.
All the wisdom of my grandmother who would caution me to calm my temper, yet to be brave and intense in my principles. With all the insight of my mother who urged me to read the Classics, and taught me to love Shakespeare. “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none, remember the countess”, she used to think that, “And you will see that All’s Well That Ends Well, son. Make it be enough, because it will be hard when you enter the bedlam”, she would conclude, and then smile with all the kindness she was able to.
I picked up the book once again; the cover pictured a work of Hyppolite Delaroche, La Jeune Martyre, a young martyr woman, her dead body drifted upon the Tiber. I began to read.
—Scatter, scatter around my love… Spread yourself about at the height of you
Highest wish of my lengthy years, free stay of my many days
Hadn’t life caught me as a drifter and fugitive, I wouldn’t have grabbed in my hands, in my breath, on my rough skin, the grace and the kindness of your skin, engraved like unending and immortal marks.
Hadn’t my pilgrim presence trodden my homeland again, like a homage of thought to heart, of heart to vision, of vision to the gentle sound of your lips, I would’ve missed the scent of scorched earth and berries, that I chase to glow and burn…
Who came to wake my torpor of drowsy child, bent in the haze of a prosaic night, numb in the cold, covered with down, and diverted by the fury of gloomy and wicked men, if not the daring judgment of my return, facing the glimmering age of wraiths, that I would miss and be away?
Ay, I would have found you waiting for one more try and roses, stretching out your arms with warm affection as the sweetest brides, though the time had passed to meet more intelligence and love, the way my childish reason would by then see and comfort the heart—
The night was dark, and a pale shimmering light lighted up the room. I rose up; I switched on the lamp whose metallic gleam grew little by little. I poured some more wine; I plunged into its magic flavor, and lunged back to my reading again.
— […] Ah, Yolène, mysterious and infinite woman, if your shapes are the sign of heaven’s beauty, I live exiled to hell. What could ever be pleasing me but you? […]
—A justicialist society is a hopeless society; it makes human kind dismal and bare. If murderers, thieves and rapists had no right to a just trial, the entire society could not claim any good. Justicialism, which is often political manipulation of the justice system, steals from people the opportunity to make progress, to driving out evil once and for all, because it bases upon blind punishment the emotion that the mass absorbs after the brutality of a crime takes place. It educates to revenge, not for justice… Huh, Monsieur Herschmann, where have you lost yourself today? What, more than Homer, rouses your interest?
Ahem. Sir, I apologize. My head… [“I don’t think this is enough…”]
Yes, your head Monsieur Herschmann. Your head is always where it is not supposed to be. Now, tell us Monsieur Herschmann, how was it that we passed from Homer to Justicialism?
That Greek hero, that sense for justice…
Monsieur Herschmann, do not deny us and take this opportunity to be a bit more cultured. I want a detailed account on the Homeric man, tomorrow! How is the Homeric man, Monsieur Herschmann?
Ahem… Particularistic… […“Men, Women, I have been seeking you… Where are you?”…] —
Well, I broke off over that “particularistic”. The sum of different parts. Yeah, σῶμα—sòma—the body, ψυχή—psuché—the vital breath, θυμός—thymòs—the affective center, φρήν—frèn—the rational center, νοῦς—nùs—the intelligence.
I thought what was left of these parts, and to whom they belonged. The entire person was reduced to sections, each one with its needs assured and suited by consumerist merchandising. The vital breath had been long extinguished to give room to a far more ephemeral commercial existence, the affective center had been replaced by the visibility to which there are no affections if they do not concur by all means to reach for the cult of fame. As for the rational center and intelligence, they had gone missing into smoky notions and empty intentions. If I had to find them before they had gone lost, I would have traveled millennia back into history. Would I have found the Man, like Monsieur Herschmann in the novel wanted to do?
I started reading again.
— […] The Sichelschnitt, was at the door, many lives were about to change forever.
At Liceo Condorcet, 8 rue du Havre, in the IX arrondissement on the rive droit, two young kids attended school, they were Yolène and Bertrand. She, Yolène, lived in rue du Faubourg Montmatre, with her good catholic bourgeois family, her father a moderate wealthy merchant. He, Bertrand, lived in boulevard Haussmann, with his good Jewish family, his father was a lawyer and his mother a teacher of literature.
France, beacon of Europe, was about to know its darkest time after the Reign of Terror—le Terreur in the 18th century—and with that eclipse of reason an unprecedented violence dimmed the light the world over […] —
“Violence”, its thinking made me startle. Violence, the same root of Vis, force. Force, coercion, obligation, it was a series of words that loose spontaneously within my mind. Vir, male man, contained the same root. The notion of virility made me sick. Virile, man, male, force, violence, force once again. Still no Man in there. All relationships based upon force. Man as force, the strongest wins. Like celestial bodies, which are attracted to one another according to gravity force, like wild beasts, like animals in the food chain. I was disgusted about the inane chattering of the declaimers of merit, to do so that a prize may come, a portion, a lucre, that is the meaning. A world that, from a time long since gone, had forgotten and buried our consciousness. Merx, goods, and merces / praemium, reward. Complete fools, idiots, punks! Claiming merit is nothing but crying for mediocrity: Merís.
I went back to reading…
— […] Beautiful Yolène, I follow you with my eyes and I fall enchanted. I try not to be caught with my hanging look, a fleeting glance just does, and I soon deflect my mind. I will take your hands, Yolène, I’ll lay ‘em down on my skin, let them warm my nerves. I’ll kiss your lips, and I shall be born once more. […] —
My mind whirling like a storm and then, I started to remember Clive, and all his genius.
London was whipped