Where Félix, having spread before him the drawings together with the journals of Don Carotte, Sang Chaud, and Lucian, marvels at seeing a single event inhabited by several gazes without ever ceasing to be the same… where, determined to verify for himself what words have already taught him, he gradually discovers that one does not always remain as easily in the place one believed oneself to occupy. He also realizes that the journals do not dictate the characters' journey. They are not the sun around which the system revolves, but rather a point of passage where trajectories that once seemed independent suddenly reveal themselves to belong to the same dance… and where he himself, little by little, begins to lose his footing.
From Félix's Journal
Just before dusk, and before the slightest detail had come to confirm the descriptions I had reread so many times, it seemed to me that the forest stood before me with that same ancient presence which Don Carotte, Sang Chaud, and, more recently, Lucian had each tried to describe in their own way. At first I was astonished to recognize a place I had never known. Then I immediately corrected myself. I recognized nothing… I was merely recovering the words and the images that had led me there.
I remained motionless for several moments.
I already knew a great deal. Too much, perhaps. The journals that only a short while before had been spread across my desk now rested in my satchel. I knew their hesitations, their moments of wonder, their silences, even those minute differences of vision that made each of them seem to write the same world without ever writing the same text. I caught myself smiling at the thought that I had almost come here merely to verify a hypothesis. The idea pleased me very little.
A hypothesis is a profoundly human way of expecting reality to confirm what one already believes. Yet I had not come all this way in order to be proven right.
I resumed my solitary walk.
If the first trees contradicted nothing, neither did they confirm anything. They were simply there, with that quiet self-evidence that cares very little for the stories men weave around them. I looked at the trunks, the lianas, the mosses, as one examines the parts of a mechanism in the hope of discovering the principle by which it works. Little by little, I understood that this very expectation was itself becoming an obstacle.
There are, no doubt, places that reveal nothing to those who seek only to understand them.
Almost against my own will, I slowed my pace.
The path now seemed to determine my rhythm by itself. Not because it imposed anything upon me, but because it quietly removed every necessity of choosing. My steps followed one another with such discretion that I soon ceased measuring the distance I had covered. The trees no longer occupied space; they gave time a new density. Then a singular impression came over me: it was not I who was passing through the forest. Rather, the forest was slowly passing through whoever consented to remain within it.
I stopped before a wall of basalt where ancient streams of lava still traced the slow undulations of their petrified flow. Between two folds of stone had grown a plant so slender that one almost had to give up trying to see it before one could begin to notice it.
At once I thought of the drawings.
Then I deliberately tried to dismiss the thought.
It was precisely then that it imposed itself.
I was no longer looking at the drawing I remembered; I was standing before that which had perhaps made the drawing possible. At first, the difference seemed immense. A few steps later, I was no longer certain which had come first. Had the drawings prepared my gaze to recognize this wall of rock? Or had this basalt cliff always been secretly present within the drawings?
I tried to recover my composure by naming things.
Basalt.
Lichens.
Roots.
Ferns.
The words came with an almost reassuring ease. Yet as they appeared, I felt them losing part of their authority. They did not disappear… they simply ceased interrupting what was taking place. For the first time, perhaps, I understood what Don Carotte had meant by presence; what Sang Chaud had recognized as a fabric of relationships; what Lucian had experienced when he discovered that the journals did not teach one what to see, but how to look.
I had not entered into their stories…
It was their stories that were, very slowly, ceasing to remain separate from mine.
A gentle uneasiness passed through me.
I wondered whether every true act of reading does not eventually lead to that singular frontier where one no longer knows whether one is accompanying a book… or whether one has quietly begun to be written by it.
The moon had risen without my noticing.
I lifted my eyes with the strange impression that I had forgotten something essential. Then I understood that my forgetting concerned no event at all. For a few brief moments, I had simply ceased watching myself live through the experience.
It then seemed to me that the deepest detours are perhaps nothing other than the paths by which consciousness finally consents to lose sight of its own center—not in order to disappear, but in order to discover that the world has never needed it in order to be fully present.
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