Where Lucian, at the beginning of his apprenticeship, wholly absorbed in redrawing and colouring the notebooks with more or less skill, thinks he can hear the echoes of a sentence...
Lucian’s Notebook
It was then that Jankélévitch came back to me, but with a strangeness that almost embarrassed me, as though the sentences I had read long ago were arriving now too late and were trying to reclaim, in the form of a thought already known, what the Archipelago had just made me experience otherwise, for I knew perfectly well, or believed I knew, that one of the conditions of happiness might consist precisely in not being conscious of one’s happiness, and I could have developed that idea, spoken of the splitting of consciousness, of that moment when what is being lived becomes an object for the person living it, of the fear of losing that begins at the very moment one discovers oneself to possess, but all of this, however true, suddenly seemed poorer to me than that slight contraction of the stomach, and more distant too, as though theory had always been speaking of an event it could only reach after it had passed, and as though it had taken this stone, this sea, this fatigue and these bare feet resting against the rock for me finally to understand how far the consciousness in question was from being the opposite of some kind of unconsciousness, since I had been fully there before knowing that I felt good there, perhaps even more completely there precisely because I had not yet begun to watch myself being there.
The Moon Child then ceased to appear to me as someone who had preserved a quality the others had lost, an innocence, some original closeness to the world, all those formulations which I now see had above all allowed me to keep him there before me, at the proper distance, so that I might observe in him what I believed myself to have become separated from; the Archipelago had, on the contrary, just displaced that very distance, for what I had thought belonged to the Child had just happened to me, fleetingly, without my having had to seek it, and I could feel that it was no longer I who was drawing closer to him through understanding, but something in what separated us that was becoming less certain, as though this way of being in the world belonged no more to him than it belonged to me, but arose only when the world ceased for a moment to remain before us and became that through which something happens to us.
The path is climbing again beneath my feet now, or perhaps it is my feet that are gradually finding the rising path again, and I would be quite unable to decide which of these two movements truly begins first, for one stone invites the foot to rest upon it while another refuses it, the slope enters the calves, the breath deepens, a branch catches my sleeve and forces me to turn my shoulder slightly, and the sea behind me disappears without any single instant being separable as the moment when I cease to see it, so that its disappearance resembles neither a loss nor a decision, but rather that slow passage through which what was still present ceases to be so before I can perceive the precise moment at which it withdrew.
Then there returns, almost without my willing it, that appearing-disappearing whose meaning I had thought I understood in books, and I see now how closely it touches upon happiness as well, since it may be that both become visible only at the moment when something has already begun to carry them away, not because consciousness destroys them, but because consciousness always arrives with that infinitesimal delay which makes it possible to recognise what, when it was wholly there, had not yet needed to be recognised; and I wonder whether the Moon Child is not so close to this movement precisely because he does not immediately transform what happens to him into something he must preserve, whether he does not allow what passes more time to pass through him, whereas I have spent so long hastening to turn back towards experience in order to verify that it was still there.
I do not turn back towards the sea now, not because I have decided to resist the temptation to see it one last time, but because the climb continues, because the next foot is already finding its stone, because my breathing has taken on a rhythm of its own, and because there is something in the Archipelago’s way of drawing me immediately back into its slope that still suspends the need to understand, as though the path itself were granting me a few moments before thought once again comes to separate what is happening from the person to whom it happens.
Meanwhile, I am still walking, or something is walking with me, and I no longer feel the immediate need to decide which of the two could most truthfully say what is taking place.
