“Besides, those ordinary travellers would have been less interested than I if, in their presence, someone had pronounced—and despite the notoriety acquired by some of them—the names of those faithful habitués whom I was astonished to see still continuing to dine out in society, although several of them had already been doing so, according to the accounts I had heard, before I was born, at a time both distant enough and vague enough for me to be tempted to exaggerate its remoteness. The contrast between the continuation not only of their existence, but of the fullness of their strength, and the annihilation of so many friends whom I had already seen disappear, here or there, gave me that same feeling we experience when, in the final edition of the newspapers, we read precisely the news we least expected—for instance that of a premature death, which seems accidental to us because the causes of which it is the outcome have remained unknown. That feeling is that death does not reach all men uniformly, but that a more advanced wave in its tragic rising carries away one life situated at the same level as others which the following waves will spare for a long time yet. We shall see later, moreover, how the diversity of deaths circulating invisibly is the cause of that peculiar element of the unexpected which obituaries present in the newspapers. Then I saw that, with time, not only do genuine gifts, which may coexist with the worst vulgarity of conversation, reveal and impose themselves, but mediocre individuals too attain those lofty positions which, in the imagination of our childhood, were associated with a few celebrated old men, without our considering that, a certain number of years later, their disciples would have become masters in their turn and would now inspire the respect and fear they themselves had once felt.”
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Sodom and Gomorrah, NRF, 1919 edition, vol. 10
Where Félix might begin to suspect that his own thought has now become one of the forces driving this “circulation”... without yet clearly becoming aware of it.
Where we learn that Félix is undergoing a genuine experience as he advances through the notebooks, until his reading takes on for him the substance of an actual geography.
Félix’s Notebook
I no longer know exactly at what point I began to notice, in the drawings Lucian sends me, the presence of the parrots.
Perhaps I ought to go through those drawings and the notebooks again in order, assuming there is such a thing as an order, since the Moon Child’s notebook sometimes seems to precede Lucian’s, which nevertheless appears to comment upon it, while Igniatius recounts things he claims to have learned from Lucian, and Don Carotte, of whom I am no longer quite sure whether he comes before or after the others, passes through several of their stories with that peculiar ease certain characters possess of finding themselves somewhere before the person telling their story has even had the idea of putting them there. I ought to go through the drawings as well, lay them side by side, check the dates when there are any—which is exceptionally rare—compare the inks, the papers, the alterations, and naturally I have done so, with that professional obstinacy which I once believed protected me from overly seductive hypotheses... but there comes a point when the accumulation of precautions itself produces a kind of vertigo, because, by following each trail separately for long enough, one discovers that they all open onto a territory whose exact boundaries appear on no map.
And suddenly the parrots were there... and they are still there... Not everywhere, obviously, which would almost be reassuring. They appear in several notebooks, sometimes merely mentioned, sometimes engaged in conversations that no one seems to find quite as astonishing as I do, and they also emerge in certain drawings, around the bend of a branch, on a railing, above a scene or slightly apart from it, with that way birds have, when represented in an image, of seeming to look at the person who is looking at them more intently than at whatever is happening around them. I could accept that Igniatius borrowed them from Lucian, that Lucian found them in the Moon Child’s world, that Don Carotte later took up what was already circulating among them; that would even be the reasonable explanation, the one I should probably write in the margin before closing the files, but that explanation presupposes precisely what I can no longer establish: who saw what first, who read whom, who knew of the existence of the other notebooks and, above all, how certain appearances answer one another when I am unable to find the passage through which they might have been transmitted. I say “transmitted” and immediately realise that the word has already begun deciding in my place.
For several days now—several weeks perhaps, I keep rather poor track of time when I remain for long periods in front of these pages... I stop for a moment before an idea... and another comes back, and the more I would like to keep it at a distance so that I can examine it properly, the more it resembles those rivers I once saw on maps whose width becomes so great as they approach the ocean that one can no longer tell at exactly what point the river ceases to be river and the sea begins to be sea. I find myself now in that almost dormant estuary where the water seems to have lost all haste, where the currents widen between mudbanks and drowned grasses, where secondary arms separate from the main channel only to return much farther on, without its being possible to say whether they have gone astray or simply knew a route unknown to us, and yet, beneath that level slowness, I can still feel something running. I truly feel it. This is not a comparison I am constructing from my chair... Beneath that thick and almost motionless water, something remembers.
The river remembers its youth. I see it descending from the mountains where it was still nothing more than icy water springing between stones, at first a transparent thread barely wide enough to encircle a root, then a torrent gathering other waters to itself, leaping over boulders, rushing into ravines whose walls draw closer together above it until only a narrow tear of sky remains between them; and I descend with it, I feel beneath my feet the rock becoming smooth, almost black, the air filling with a cold spray torn from the waterfalls, while the walls, covered in yellow lichens, thick mosses and ferns clinging to fissures no human hand could ever reach, rise on either side like the ramparts of a world that would never have needed us.
Farther down, the torrent disappears.
