“He imagined, moreover, that his own face, his name, his personality were not unknown to them, and that, on catching sight of him, they were often obliged to suppress a fleeting impulse to greet him. People in society, simply because they know people of original talent and invite them to dinner, do not understand them any better for that. But once one has lived a little in society, the stupidity of its inhabitants makes one long too much to live elsewhere, makes one suppose too much intelligence in those obscure circles where people know only ‘without knowing.’”
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, NRF, 1919 edition, vol. 5
Where Félix, seeking to follow through the notebooks the traces left by the characters, the drawings and the parrots, gradually discovers that he no longer knows very well who precedes whom, nor by what route the images pass from one story to another. Yet as he advances, the investigation ceases to be merely intellectual: the pages become a territory for him, the stories become paths, and reading itself begins to acquire the substance of a journey.
When, to our eyes, the river has disappeared... it sinks beneath a mass of rock whose opening is almost entirely hidden by vegetation, and I continue to follow it, without asking myself how I enter, just as the first travellers might follow on their incomplete maps a watercourse as far as the point where the line suddenly stopped and the blank space began, requiring them to move forward themselves. The vault descends, the water turns black, the walls are covered with gleaming concretions; roots sometimes pass through the stone by way of invisible fissures and hang in the darkness as though the forest above were trying to touch the river it can no longer see. Colonies of pale creatures occupy the crevices, almost transparent crustaceans, insects with disproportionately long limbs, fish whose eyes seem long ago to have relinquished every function, and yet life remains everywhere, adapted to that darkness with such precision that one might almost believe light had been only one possibility among others.
Then the water emerges again.
It has forgotten nothing of what it was before entering beneath the mountain, and yet it is no longer quite the same. Salts, fragments of rock, microscopic organisms are now carried along with it; its temperature has changed; other streams may have joined it in the depths without anyone ever having been able to witness their meeting. Then it resumes its wild course, hurtles between needles of basalt, carves canyons whose exposed strata seem to leaf through millions of years beneath the open sky, winds around reddish cliffs where twisted trees have driven their roots into a few handfuls of soil and, farther down still, when at last it reaches the great plains, it slows, broadens, becomes navigable, receives tributaries some of which have travelled farther than it has, and yet no one asks by what right they come to mingle their waters with its own.
Perhaps this is what I am reading.
Or rather, this is what is happening to me as I read.
A thought arises somewhere, tiny, so slender that it might disappear between two sentences. It may come from a word spoken by the Moon Child, from a drawing by Don Carotte, from a remark by Igniatius, from a note left by Lucian when I am not even certain he understood what he was writing at the moment he wrote it. I notice it, or perhaps it is the thought that finds in me something to which it can attach itself, then a second arrives, then a third, and soon I can no longer continue reading as I did before because each one draws another consequence after it, forces me to go back ten pages, suddenly illuminates a detail I had filed away among the insignificant things, then obscures what I thought I had understood.
As they come into our minds, thoughts develop of their own accord.
I could almost hear that sentence being spoken by one of the parrots.
And immediately the other would ask:
— Would we have nothing to do with it?
A reasonable question, obviously, and even an indispensable one, because the opposite hypothesis would become far too convenient. It would be enough to say that thoughts pass through us and there we are, relieved of everything, mere receptacles visited by sovereign ideas that would make their way without us. But that is not what I experience here. They need something. A certain energy, perhaps, as the other bird says. Attention, certainly, memory, desire, obstinacy too, and sometimes that strange inability to abandon a question even though I know perfectly well that it will probably lead me to no usable conclusion.
They need a medium.
A brain, if one likes, with its circuits, however imperfect they may be, but even that word suddenly seems too narrow to me, because they also pass through the eyes following the lines, through the hand turning the page, through that fatigue at the back of my neck when I remain bent over for too long, through the almost physical sensation I sometimes feel when a correspondence appears between two drawings separated by several hundred pages. They pass through what I know and through what I have forgotten, through my professional habits, my errors, my prejudices, the books I read thirty years ago and from which a sentence rises again before I can immediately remember its author; they pass even through the images before me, which I continue to see when I close my eyes.
I could therefore say that they use us, provided I do not turn that formula into a doctrine.
An organism, a language, a personal history, a culture offer them, for a time, a place in which to continue what they began elsewhere. But none of those places is neutral. The river that passes through a mountain does not emerge carrying exactly the same water, any more than the mountain remains perfectly unchanged after its passage. Thoughts encounter within us our words, our memories, our forgettings, our associations, our resistances; they may develop there, diminish there, become distorted there, sometimes even take a direction almost contrary to the one they seemed to have before.
The person they pass through is therefore neither their absolute creator nor an innocent conduit.
He lends them a temporary form.
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