Where Félix comes to realise that something must be put at stake for a passage to take place.
Lucian’s Notebook
I find myself thinking again of the spectator who pays for his seat in order to enter the theatre or go beneath the big top, and I wonder whether the money he gives is not the least interesting price of all. He had to leave home, come here, sit among others, accept for a while that something might happen over which he would not be entirely in command. Perhaps the real price begins when he gives up the security of certain habits, when he can no longer watch what is happening as though it had no consequence for the way in which he watches.
Something must be put at stake for the passage to take place.
Not necessarily anything great, and certainly not the kind of solemn conversion that some books seem to demand of their reader before he has even begun to read them. It may be almost nothing: a certainty that has become unusable, a distinction that until then held perfectly well and now begins to blur, an external position to which one believed oneself entitled and which one gradually discovers does not exist.
I wonder, then, whether I have not spent too long trying to understand what these notebooks, exercise books, letters and drawings contain.
Perhaps I should instead be looking at what they compel me to do.
They contain stories, fragments, figures, memories whose ownership I can no longer always determine, but also resistances, repetitions, gaps, incomplete traces, passages that do not coincide, doors opening onto places through which one thought one had already passed. I do not yet know what all this will form, or even whether it is right to think of it already in terms of a book.
But if a book were one day to be born from all this, perhaps it would not contain the path through it. It might contain only enough traces for someone to be compelled to make that path.
And if that is true, then I must admit something that concerns me more closely than I would have wished: I thought I was describing the moment when I realised that I could no longer observe this story from the riverbank, but it may be that this moment enjoys no particular privilege, that it is merely one of those places where something that had already begun becomes visible.
Perhaps I did not leave the bank when I understood that I was in the river. I was already there. And what allows me to become aware of it today may not be the current itself, since I might still let myself be carried along by it without seeing it, but rather that former function which I thought I had abandoned and which remains somewhere, motionless amid everything that passes, like the rock around which the water suddenly turns white.
Whoever, one day perhaps, passes through these pages may smile at how late I was to understand, until the moment when he begins to wonder how long the current, too, has been passing through him.
