In “A Scandal in Bohemia”
by Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes says to Watson:
“You have not observed.
And yet you have seen.”
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Félix’s Notebook (Part One)
As so often, I had begun by writing down what I saw, or rather what my profession had taught me to regard as sufficiently visible to be recorded without too much risk and without betraying too much… perhaps I should say bearing witness to… the slightest feeling… under any circumstances… All the more so when faced with a simple drawing: an adult figure, identifiable as Don Carotte, moving in profile towards the left, his eyes closed, holding in his right hand a suspended cage containing a figure of the same appearance but much smaller in size. His left hand accompanies the cage without appearing to grasp it. A rope attached to its upper part descends towards the main figure, passes close to his neck before reaching his waist. The clothes worn by the two figures are similar and seem too large for them… A crescent moon occupies the background.
I could still stand by that description, and I do not believe anyone could seriously reproach me for having introduced into it anything that is not present in the image… only I know now that it possesses that particular kind of exactitude to which I devoted a considerable part of my professional life and which, increasingly, I discover can be a highly perfected way of not seeing, for everything was there… from the very beginning, absolutely everything, the cage, the rope, the neck, the belly, the clothes, the closed eyes, and yet nothing had begun to germinate in my overly well-ordered mind, as though I had carefully drawn up an inventory of the instruments of a piece of music whose first measure I had never heard… nor the slightest chord.
I no longer know exactly what came first, and perhaps it would be wrong now to try to restore an order that the image itself never imposed upon me. I remember only that, at a certain moment, the small figure enclosed in the cage ceased, for me, to be “a figure of the same appearance” and became, with an obviousness that almost embarrassed me, Don Carotte himself, which at first seemed to simplify matters and immediately made them more complicated, for I could still say that Don Carotte was carrying the one he had once been… a convenient enough formula, almost too convenient, until the clothes came to contradict it: those oversized clothes worn by the little being are the same ones the Moon Child already wore, but they are also those of the man he has become, and they remain upon him as though they were still too large, no longer merely too large for his child’s body, but too large for the body he has nevertheless spent a lifetime growing into.
Then he was no longer carrying merely the one he had been… he was carrying the one he was, the one he had perhaps always been, and, stranger still to me, the one he had not yet become when those clothes were already wrapped around him, so that time ceased to arrange itself obediently behind and ahead of him, the past at his back, the future before him, for now what had been was being carried before his belly like that which has yet to be born, and the man was advancing towards what lay behind him while holding it before him.
I had paused over his closed eyes, of course, and at first I had used the usual words, inwardness, contemplation, perhaps even memory, until it became obvious to me that those eyes were not closed in order to see inward more clearly, as we say far too readily, but because Don Carotte was listening; and that observation, almost meagre at first, opened something I had not foreseen, since the Moon Child did not speak, or did not yet speak, but that in no way means that he was cut off from language, for long before the mouth knows how to answer, the ear is already receiving, long before the child can utter a name, voices, sounds, breaths are already passing through him, perhaps even the beating of his own heart mingled with that of the one who carries him, and I understood then that Don Carotte, now a man and now capable of speech, was closing his eyes not in order to recover the words of the child he had once been, since perhaps there had been none, but in an attempt to hear what that child had heard when no one yet could ask him to explain it.
