Thus, to withdraw as far as you can from the jousting and combat that are the appanages of our warrior species, you drink a cup of tea, or perhaps you watch a film by Ozu, and place upon this sorry theater the seal of Art and its greatest treasures.
13. Eternity
At nine in the evening, I put a cassette into the video player, a film by Ozu, The Munekata Sisters. This is my tenth Ozu film this month. Why? Because Ozu is a genius who can rescue me from biological destiny.
It all started one day when I told Angèle, our little librarian, that I was very fond of the early Wim Wenders films, and she said, Oh, have you seen Tokyo-Ga? And when you’ve seen Tokyo-Ga, which is an extraordinary documentary devoted to Ozu, then obviously you want to find out more about Ozu. So I found out more about Ozu and, for the first time in my life, the Art of the cinema made me laugh and cry as real entertainment should.
I press the start button, sip my jasmine tea. From time to time I rewind, thanks to this secular rosary known as the remote control.
And here is an extraordinary scene.
The father, played by Chishu Ryu, one of Ozu’s preferred actors and a vital lead through all his work, an extraordinary man who radiates warmth and humility—this father, therefore, is about to die, and is conversing with his daughter Setsuko about the stroll they have just taken through Kyoto. They are drinking saké.
THE FATHER
And the Moss Temple! The light made the moss even more splendid.
SETSUKO
And the camellia on the moss, too.
THE FATHER
Oh, did you notice? How beautiful it was! (Pause.) There are beautiful things in old Japan. (Pause.) Insisting that it’s all bad . . . I find that outrageous.
The film continues and right at the end comes this last scene, in a park, where Setsuko, the eldest, is talking with Mariko, her capricious younger sister.
SETSUKO, her face radiant
Tell me, Mariko, why are the mountains of Kyoto violet?
MARIKO, mischievously
It’s true. They look like azuki bean paste.
SETSUKO, smiling
It’s such a lovely color.
The film is about disappointed love, arranged marriages, parents and children, brotherhood, the death of the father, the old and new faces of Japan, as well as alcohol and the violence of men.
But above all it is about something that is unattainable to Western sensibilities, and that only Japanese culture can elucidate. Why do these two short, unexplained scenes, not driven by anything in the plot, arouse in us such a powerful emotion, containing the entire film between their ineffable parentheses?
Here is the key to the film.
SETSUKO
True novelty is that which does not grow old, despite the passage of time.
The camellia against the moss of the temple, the violet hues of the Kyoto mountains, a blue porcelain cup—this sudden flowering of pure beauty at the heart of ephemeral passion: is this not something we all aspire to? And something that, in our Western civilization, we do not know how to attain?
The contemplation of eternity within the very movement of life.
Journal of the Movement of the World No. 3
Go on, catch up with her!
When I think there are people who don’t have television! How do they manage? I could spend hours watching. I turn the sound off and watch. I feel as if I’m watching things with an X-ray. If you turn the sound off, in fact, you’re removing the wrapping paper, the pretty tissue paper enveloping some two-bit piece of rubbish. If you watch the television news reports in this way, you’ll see: the images have no connection to each other, the only thing that does link them is the commentary, which wants you to take a chronological succession of images for a real succession of events.
Anyway, I love television. And this afternoon I saw an interesting movement of the world: a diving contest. Several contests, in fact. It was a retrospective of all the world championships in this particular sport. There were individual dives, with compulsory figures and freestyle, men and women, but above all, what caught my interest was the synchronized diving. In addition to their individual prowess with all these twists, somersaults and flips, the two divers have to be synchronized. Not just more or less together, no: perfectly together, to the very thousandth of a second.
The funniest thing is when the divers have very different builds: a stocky little person with a long slim one. You tell yourself, this will never work; from a physical point of view, they cannot take off and arrive at the same time, but they do, go figure. Object lesson: in the world, everything is compensation. When you can’t go as fast, you push harder. But here’s where I found subject matter for my journal: two young Chinese women got up on the springboard. Two long slim goddesses with shining black braids, who could have been twins, they looked so alike, but the commentator made a point of saying they weren’t even sisters. In short, they went out on the springboard and at that point I think we must have all been doing the same thing: holding our breath.
Following a few graceful bounces, they jumped. The first microseconds were perfect. I felt that perfection in my body; it would seem it’s a question of “mirror neurons”: when you watch someone doing something, the same neurons that they activate in order to do something become active in your brain, without you doing a thing. An acrobatic dive without budging from the sofa and while eating potato chips: that’s why we like watching sports on television. Anyway, the two graces jump and, right at the beginning, it’s ecstasy. And then, catastrophe! All at once you get the impression that they are very very slightly out of synch. You stare at the screen, a knot in your stomach: no doubt about it, they are out of synch. I know it seems crazy to describe it like this when the jump itself cannot last more than maybe three seconds in all but, precisely because it doesn’t last more than three seconds, you look at every phase as if it lasted a century. And now it has become clear, you can no longer hide from the truth: they are out of synch! One of them is going to reach the water before the other! It’s horrible!
I sat there shouting at the television: go on, catch up with her, go on! I felt incredibly angry with the one who had dawdled. I sunk deeper into the sofa, disgusted. What is this? Is that the movement of the world? An infinitesimal lapse that has just succeeded in ruining the possibility of perfection forever? I spent at least half an hour in a foul mood. And then suddenly I wondered: but why did I want so desperately for her to catch up? Why does it feel so rotten when the movement is not in synch? It’s not very hard to come up with an answer: all those things that pass before us, which we miss by a hair and which are botched for eternity . . . All the words we should have said, gestures we should have made, the fleeting moments of kairos that were there one day and that we did not know how to grasp and that were buried forever in the void . . . Failure, by a hair’s breadth . . . But then another idea surfaced thanks to these mirror neurons. A disturbing idea, moreover, and vaguely Proustian, no doubt (which annoys me). What if literature were a television we gaze into in order to activate our mirror neurons and give ourselves some action-packed cheap thrills? And even worse: what if literature were a television showing us all the things we have missed?
So much for the movement of the world! It could have been perfection and it was a disaster. It should be experienced in reality and it is pleasure by proxy, like always.
And so I ask you: why stay in such a world?
14. When of a Sudden, Old Japan
The next morning, Chabrot rings at my loge. He seems to have mastered his emotions, his voice no longer trembles, his nose is dry and suntanned. But he makes me think of a ghost.
“Pierre has died,” he says, in a flat voice.
“I am sorry.”
I truly am sorry for him, for even if Pierre Arthens is no longer in pain, Chabrot will have to learn to live, however dead he may feel. “The undertakers will be arriving,” adds Chabrot in his spectral voice. “I’d be very grateful if you’d show them up to th
e apartment.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll be back in two hours, to take care of Anna.”
He looks at me for a moment in silence.
“Thank you,” he says, for the second time in twenty years.
I am tempted to reply in keeping with the ancestral traditions of concierges but, I scarcely know why, the words will not come out. Perhaps it is because Chabrot will not be coming here anymore, because the strongest barriers break down in the presence of death, because I am thinking about Lucien, and because decency, after all, precludes any sort of wariness that might offend the deceased.
So I do not say, Don’t mention it, but rather: “You know . . . everything comes at its appointed time.”
That might sound like a platitude, although it is also something similar to what Marshal Kutuzov says to Prince Andrei in War and Peace: I have been much blamed, both for war, and for peace . . . But everything comes at its appointed time . . . Tout vient à son heure pour qui sait attendre.
I would give anything to be able to read it in Russian. What I have always liked about this passage are the pauses, the balance between war and peace, the ebb and flow of his thoughts, like the tide on the shore carrying the riches of the ocean, in, and out. Was this merely a whim on the part of the translator, embroidering something that might have been very simple in the original—I have been much blamed, both for war, and for peace—thus consigning my maritime ruminations to the chapter of unfounded extravagance, or is this the very essence of a superb text which, even today, still moves me, however I resist, to tears of joy?
Chabrot nods his head slowly, then departs.
The rest of the morning is dreary. I have no posthumous affection for Pierre Arthens, but I find myself wandering about like a lost soul, unable even to read. The camellia and the moss had offered me a brief but happy interlude from the coarseness of the world: now that is over, leaving no hope, and my heart is bitter, tormented by the darkness of all these unhappy events.
When of a sudden Old Japan intervenes: from one of the apartments wafts a melody, clearly, joyfully distinct. Someone is playing a classical piece on the piano. Ah, sweet, impromptu moment, lifting the veil of melancholy . . . In a split second of eternity, everything is changed, transfigured. A few bars of music, rising from an unfamiliar piece, a touch of perfection in the flow of human dealings—I lean my head slowly to one side, reflect on the camellia on the moss of the temple, reflect on a cup of tea, while outside the wind is rustling the foliage, the forward rush of life is crystallized in a brilliant jewel of a moment that knows neither projects nor future, human destiny is rescued from the pale succession of days, glows with light at last and, surpassing time, warms my tranquil heart.
15. The Rich Man’s Burden
Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education. What does education imply? One must offer camellias on moss, tirelessly, in order to escape the natural impulses of our species, because those impulses do not change, and continually threaten the fragile equilibrium of survival.
I am a very camellia-on-moss sort of person. If I really think about it, there is nothing else that can quite explain my withdrawal into this bleak loge of mine. As I was convinced very early on of the pointlessness of my existence, I could have chosen to rebel, and taking God as my witness that I had been cruelly used by fate, I could have resorted to the violence inherent in our condition. But school made of me a soul whose unpromising destiny led only to abnegation and confinement. The wonder of my second birth had shown me the way to master my impulses: since it was school that had given birth to me, I had to show my allegiance, and thus I complied with my instructors’ intentions by tamely becoming a most civilized human being. In fact, when the struggle to dominate our primate aggressiveness takes up arms as powerful as books and words, the undertaking is an easy one, and that is how I became an educated person, finding in written symbols the strength to resist my own nature.
Thus I was utterly astonished by my own reaction when Antoine Pallières rang imperiously at the loge three times, and without a greeting began reproachfully haranguing me for the disappearance of his chrome scooter: I slammed the door in his face, and at the same time very nearly amputated my cat’s tail as he was slipping out the door.
Not so very camellia-on-moss after all, I thought.
And as I had to allow Leo re-entry into his quarters, I immediately opened the door again after I had slammed it.
“Excuse me,” I said, “a draft.”
Antoine Pallières looked at me with the expression of someone who wonders if he has really seen what he thinks he has seen. But as he has been conditioned to imagine that only what must happen does happen, in the way that rich people convince themselves that their lives run along a heavenly track that the power of money has quite naturally laid for them, Antoine decided to believe me. I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken.
“Yes, well, anyway I was mainly coming to give you this from my mother,” he said.
And he handed me a white envelope.
“Thank you,” I said, and shut the door in his face for the second time.
And here I am in my kitchen with the envelope in my hand.
“What is wrong with me this morning?” I say to Leo.
The death of Pierre Arthens has been wilting my camellias.
I open the envelope and read this little note written on a business card whose surface is so glossy that the ink, to the dismay of the defeated blotter, has bled slightly underneath each letter.
Madame Michel,
Would you be so kind as, to sign for the packages
from the dry cleaner’s this afternoon?
I’ll pick them up at your loge this evening.
Scribbled signature
I was not prepared for such an underhanded attack. I collapse in shock on the nearest chair. I even begin to wonder if I am not going mad. Does this have the same effect on you, when this sort of thing happens?
Let me explain:
The cat is sleeping.
You’ve just read a harmless little sentence, and it has not caused you any pain or sudden fits of suffering, has it? Fair enough.
Now read again:
The cat, is sleeping.
Let me repeat it, so that there is no cause for ambiguity:
The cat comma is sleeping.
The cat, is sleeping.
Would you be so kind as, to sign for.
On the one hand we have an example of a prodigious use of the comma that takes great liberties with language, as said commas have been inserted quite unnecessarily, but to great effect:
I have been much blamed, both for war, and for peace . . .
And on the other hand, we have this dribbling scribbling on vellum, courtesy of Sabine Pallières, this comma slicing the sentence in half with all the trenchancy of a knife blade:
Would you be so kind as, to sign for the packages from the dry cleaner’s?
If Sabine Pallières had been a good Portuguese woman born under a fig tree in Faro, or a concierge who’d just arrived from the high-rise banlieues of Paris, or if she were the mentally challenged member of a tolerant family who had taken her in out of the goodness of their hearts, I might have whole-heartedly forgiven such guilty nonchalance. But Sabine Pallières is wealthy. Sabine Pallières is the wife of a bigwig in the arms industry, Sabine Pallières is the mother of a cretin in a conifer green duffle coat who, once he has his requisite diplomas and has obtained his Political Science degree, will in all likelihood go on to disseminate the mediocrity of his paltry ideas in a right-wing ministerial cabinet, and Sabine Pallières is, moreover, the daughter of a nasty woman in a fur coat who sits on the selection committee of a very prestigious publ
ishing house and who is always so overloaded with jewels that there are days when I fear she will collapse from the sheer weight of them.
For all of these reasons, Sabine Pallières has no excuse. The gifts of fate come with a price. For those who have been favored by life’s indulgence, rigorous respect in matters of beauty is a non-negotiable requirement. Language is a bountiful gift and its usage, an elaboration of community and society, is a sacred work. Language and usage evolve over time: elements change, are forgotten or reborn, and while there are instances where transgression can become the source of an even greater wealth, this does not alter the fact that to be entitled to the liberties of playfulness or enlightened misusage when using language, one must first and foremost have sworn one’s total allegiance. Society’s elect, those whom fate has spared from the servitude that is the lot of the poor, must, consequently, shoulder the double burden of worshipping and respecting the splendors of language. Finally, Sabine Pallières’s misuse of punctuation constitutes an instance of blasphemy that is all the more insidious when one considers that there are marvelous poets born in stinking caravans or high-rise slums who do have for beauty the sacred respect that it is so rightfully owed.
To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.
At this critical moment in my indignant ruminations someone rings at my loge.
Profound Thought No. 7
To build
You live
You die
These are
Consequences
The more time goes by, the more determined I become to set this place on fire. Not to mention committing suicide. The need becomes painfully obvious: I got told off by Papa because I corrected one of his guests who’d said something untrue. In fact it was Tibère’s father. Tibère is my sister’s boyfriend. He’s in the École Normale Supérieure with her, but he studies mathematics. When I think they call these people the elite . . . The only difference I can see between Colombe, Tibère, their friends and a gang of “working-class” kids is that my sister and her chums are stupider. They drink and smoke and talk as if they were from the projects and toss phrases around like, “Hollande really did for Fabius with his referendum, get a load of that, the dude’s a real killer” (I swear to you), or: “All the RDs (research directors) who’ve been appointed over the last two years are right-wing pigs, yes, the far right has got us locked up, better not mess with your dissertation director” (heard only yesterday). At a lower level, you get: “Right, the blonde that J.B. is chasing, she’s an English major, a blonde, right” (idem) and slightly above: “Marian’s lecture, that was like, excellent, when he said that existence isn’t the first attribute of God” (idem, just after closing the file on the blond English major). What am I supposed to think? And here’s the jackpot (give or take a word): “Being an atheist doesn’t mean you can’t see the power of metaphysical ontology. Yeah, what matters is the conceptual power, not truth. And Marian, filthy priest, he’s fly, yo? Calms ya down.