(101) A Forgotten Letter

Where Félix, deeply absorbed and entirely occupied with reading the drawings, notices in the periphery of his vision a small white corner protruding from the imposing pile of his notebooks. Thus he rediscovers a letter from Lucian, slipped between the pages, crumpled by time, almost illegible in places, probably because of the sea-damp air of the Archipelago from which it had been sent. It will seem strange to him that he had not understood sooner what it already contained.

Letter from Lucian

My dear Félix,
I am writing to you in the middle of the night, that equivocal hour when objects seem to hesitate between their presence and their memory. The lamp illuminates my table with that magnificent poverty peculiar to tired lights, which never entirely banish the darkness but instead compose with it a kind of silent treaty.
The drawings are here before me. I have turned some of them toward the wall, as one sometimes turns the portraits of the dead when their gaze becomes too persistent. And yet... it is as though they continue to watch me.
I am beginning to believe that there are figures that continue their work even after we stop looking at them.
You will smile at that phrase, and you will be right to do so. It possesses that almost theatrical excess you sometimes reproach me for. Yet I assure you that I speak here with the utmost seriousness.
For some time now I have been reflecting on that old idea of Newton, later taken up by Herschel: the vera causa. The expression haunts me.
I believe it is misunderstood when science is reduced to a cold mechanism. The great scientists were often men pursued by an almost poetic intuition of the hidden unity of the world. Newton himself resembled less an accountant of the stars than a prophet confined within an observatory.
What he sought was not a convenient explanation. Convenient explanations swarm like insects around lamps. They are born every day. They die every evening.
No. He sought a cause real enough to leave its mark upon several regions of the world at once.
That is what distinguishes a true cause from a mere intellectual invention: its overflow.
A fragile hypothesis remains imprisoned within the problem that produced it. It resembles those prisoners who pace their cells until the stone is worn away beneath their own footsteps.
But the true cause travels.
One encounters it elsewhere.
It appears where no one expected it.
Suddenly it explains the tides after having explained apples... then the planets... then comets... then phenomena still unknown at the very moment it was conceived.
It acts like those great underground rivers whose course the whole earth seems slowly to be learning.
I sometimes wonder whether certain human figures possess a similar power.
Not ordinary persons.
I am speaking of figures in the ancient sense of the term.
Inner forms.
Presences capable of secretly organizing a multitude of scattered facts.
Thus certain beings enter a life as minor events. Then their influence gradually spreads into unforeseen regions. They alter the dreams of others. Their language contaminates sentences that no longer belong to them. They shift the invisible centers of gravity of the lives around them.
I am going to make a strange confession.
At times I think that certain figures are born before the beings who will bear them.
You already perceive the danger of such a thought. I see it myself.
But hear me out to the end.
When a figure truly appears, it produces around itself a series of coherences that seem retrospective. Suddenly old memories become readable. Encounters acquire another meaning. Isolated images come together like fragments of metal drawn toward the same magnet buried beneath a table.
That is precisely what troubles me about the drawings.
At first I believed they represented something.
Today I am beginning to fear that they produce something.
Do you understand the difference?
The first hypothesis still belongs to the order of sight.
The second concerns the order of causes.
What if certain images were not merely reflections but agents?
What if they possessed that silent power of the verae causae of which Herschel spoke?
I can already hear you protesting that I am drifting dangerously toward symbolism or superstition. Perhaps.
Yet the ancients sometimes knew how to recognize what our age refuses even to name: certain forms transform reality simply because they reorganize attention, memory, expectation, and desire.
After all, an entire nation may die for a flag that is nothing more than a piece of cloth.
A man may cross a continent for a face glimpsed only once.
A childhood may be governed for fifty years by a sentence heard on a staircase or from behind a door.
Why should figures be any less real than stones?
I shall go further still.
I am beginning to suspect that the most powerful characters are not invented by their authors in the naïve sense of the word.
They emerge.
They slowly condense through readings, memories, fears, copies, voices heard behind doors, dreams whose ownership no one truly claims.
Then, one day, someone serves as their passage.
Perhaps that is the true writer: not the one who creates, but the one who lets them enter.
I shall stop here.
Not because I have nothing more to say.
Because certain ideas become more dangerous the more clearly they are formulated.
And besides, it is very late.
The sea strikes the cliffs like an immense black respiration.
The drawings are still turned toward the wall.
Yet I have the absurd impression that they continue to watch me.
Lucian