(10) The abracadabrant story of the Moon Child

 ENGLISH TRANSLATION

 

 

 

 

 

“I am undertaking a work without precedent, and whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I wish to show my fellow men a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself. Myself alone. I feel my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I dare to believe that I am not made like any of those who exist. If I am not better, at least I am different. Whether nature did well or ill to break the mold into which it cast me is something that can only be judged after having read me. Let the trumpet of the Last Judgment sound whenever it will; I shall come, this book in my hand, to present myself before the sovereign judge. I shall say aloud: this is what I have done, what I have thought, what I was. I have spoken of good and evil with the same frankness. I have concealed nothing that was bad, added nothing that was good; and if it has happened to me to employ some indifferent ornament, it has only ever been to fill a gap caused by my lack of memory.”

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, Book I (1782)

 

 

 

 

 – Not long ago you were still questioning me…

– That is true.
– That is the right word for it…
– What was I asking you?
– You were asking me, ‘when shall we know whether what we see and hear is true?’
– That was not exactly the question…
– It matters little, the subject has no bottom…
– Because it is so deep!
– We would first have to agree on what we mean by truth… Could you tell me what you understand by truth?
– In truth… I do not know…
– The fact is that it is a very difficult thing to establish… but…
– But?
– But what if we tried!
– In all honesty, I must tell you… it is a battle lost in advance.

– And yet… we are honest… we repeat what has been told to us!
– He makes us honest. Which is not the same thing, and which is far less convenient than being so by oneself…
– He? You mean our master and creator? And besides… honest… honest… you say that as if it were a punishment… or a correction.
– Is it not one, most often? Look at what is asked of someone when they are asked to be honest. They are asked to renounce the arrangement they had made with themselves. That tacit, comfortable arrangement by which they had decided not to look too far in certain directions.
– But without that arrangement…
– Without that arrangement, one might not be able to live. Or at least not to live among others. Total honesty is a form of violence. Not always intended—indeed, it is rarely intended—but a violence nonetheless. The one who always says exactly what he sees ends up alone, or banished, or, if the time allows it, burned.
– You have names in mind.
– I pass several in review, yes. And I notice that they almost all have in common that they were, during their lifetime, far less admired than after their death. Honesty, curiously, improves with time. It is better tolerated when it can no longer affect you directly.
– Then it is a form of cowardice.
– It is a form of prudence. I do not confuse the two, even if they resemble one another from afar and sometimes inhabit the same person without knowing each other. Cowardice knows what it is doing and turns away. Prudence negotiates. It says to itself: what I see may be true, but is this the right moment, the right place, the right interlocutor? Will the truth I am about to speak serve anything, or will it only serve to relieve me of having spoken it?
– Then true honesty would be disinterested.
– It ought to be. But therein lies its cruelest contradiction: one can never fully know whether one is honest out of concern for the other… or out of a need… or for oneself. In every confession, in every declaration of truth, there is a share of personal relief that strangely resembles selfishness. One confesses less to free the other than to unburden oneself.
– Honesty as hygiene!
– As hygiene, yes, and sometimes as a weapon. I have known people of formidable honesty. They always told the truth, and it is precisely for that reason that nothing could be held against them when they hurt you. They even found in it, I believe, a certain quiet pride. A kind of… moral cleanliness that dispensed with tenderness.
– And the Moon Child, in all this?
– The Moon Child does not choose to be honest. He is so as one is left-handed, without expecting any reward, without even measuring the consequences. And that is precisely what disturbs. A chosen honesty can be negotiated, understood, sometimes turned against the one who displays it. But an honesty that is not aware of itself… one does not know where to grasp it. It offers no hold.
– It cannot therefore be imitated.
– It cannot even truly be recognized. It is mistaken for naivety, for stubbornness, for a lack—a lack of calculation, a lack of social finesse. One looks behind it for a hidden intention because one cannot imagine that something so disturbing could be innocent. And while one searches for the intention… one misses the truth.
– As with auguries.
– … As with auguries. One looks so intently within the frame one has drawn… that one no longer sees what happens outside it.
– Like the Moon Child?
– The Moon Child sees it.
– How does he do it?
– He reads. He reads a great deal… and then…
– And then what?
– Then he no longer thinks about it…
– Then you will not believe me… Not thinking any longer allows him to leave the frame that encloses us…”