Where Félix comes to understand that ideas may care less about the identity of those who think them than about the places where they can continue on their way. As the river reaches the estuary and mingles its waters with those that have come from elsewhere, he experiences in the same way the influx of thoughts, laden with their earlier passages, settling within him, mingling with one another, and imperceptibly transforming the one who still believed he was simply reading them.
Félix’s Notebook
— According to our own master, ideas would make no distinction between them and us…
I should like to know who this master is of whom the parrots speak… At first I thought that knowing this would settle part of the problem. Find the master, establish the line of descent, reconstruct the origin. But I understand now that the sentence destroys precisely the hierarchy that my method would like to restore.
We attach enormous importance to the identity of the one who thinks. Master, disciple, teacher, child, writer, patient, scholar, parrot. We almost immediately classify words according to the one who utters them, and only afterwards decide what weight they ought to receive. An idea, if I accept for a moment the fiction they are proposing to me, would be far less impressed by such titles.
What would matter to it would be its being able to continue. It might fail in a master and prosper in his pupil. It might remain almost inert for centuries in a book before encountering a reader in whom something begins again.
It might be awkwardly formulated by someone who does not grasp its full reach, then developed much later by someone who does not even know the place from which it came to him. And the one whom history will retain as its author may have been only one of the particularly fertile sites through which it passed. I look then at the notebooks spread out before me, and I no longer know very well what before me means.
The river has reached the estuary.
It has almost no slope left. Its water spreads out beneath an immense sky, and the movements there become so slow that little islands of silt may appear and then disappear from one season to the next; reeds advance into the backwaters, birds walk in a few inches of water upon mudflats that will be submerged a few hours later, the tide rises against the current and carries the taste of salt far inland. What comes down from the mountain now meets what comes from the ocean, and no visible line makes it possible to decide exactly where one begins and the other ends.
I feel that water even in my legs. Slowness is not immobility. Everything that seems asleep goes on circulating. The silts carried from mountains no one here can see settle around my feet; fragments torn from cliffs long since collapsed pass slowly through water that has grown turbid; seeds borne from tributaries whose names I do not know drift towards a bank where perhaps they may germinate. What arrives in the estuary bears with it landscapes that no longer resemble at all what they once were, and yet they are there. Thoughts arrive in the same way. In number.
Some still swift, almost violent, as though they had kept the slope of the ravines where they were born; others already slow, laden with all they have passed through; some disappear into a secondary arm and I think them lost before finding them again several days later, farther on, mingled with another; still others deposit something and then move on, and there remains in my memory a layer so fine that I notice its presence only when a following thought in turn comes to settle upon it. I noticed nothing when the journey began.
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