This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is
enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives
surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him
through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell. For example, when I was in Hamburg, with that Erna girl I
didn’t trust and who was afraid of me, I led a funny sort of life. But I was in the middle of it, I
didn’t think about it. And then one evening, in a little café in San Pauli, she left me to go to the
ladies’ room. I stayed alone, there was a phonograph playing “Blue Skies.” I began to tell myself
what had happened since I landed. I told myself, “The third evening, as I was going into a dance
hall called ha Grotte Bleue, I noticed a large woman, half seas over. And that woman is the one
I am waiting for now, listening to ‘Blue Skies,’ the woman who is going to come back and sit
down at my right and put her arms around my neck.” Then I felt violently that I was having an
adventure. But Erna came back and sat down beside me, she wound her arms around my neck
and I hated her without knowing why. I understand now: one had to begin living again and the
adventure was fading out.
Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all.
There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable,
monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total: you say: I’ve been travelling for
three years, I’ve been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: you never leave a
woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers,
everything is the same after two weeks. There are moments—rarely—when you make a
landmark, you realize that you’re going with a woman, in some messy business. The time of a
flash. After that, the procession starts again, you begin to add up hours and days: Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926.
That’s living. But everything changes when you tell about life; it’s a change no one notices: the
proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things
happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start at the
beginning: “It was a fine autumn eveningin 1922. I was a notary’s clerk in Marommes.” And in
reality you have started at the end. It was there, invisible and present, it is the one which gives
to words the pomp and value of a beginning. “I was out walking, I had left the town without
realizing it, I was thinking about my money troubles.” This sentence, taken simply for what it
is, means that the man was absorbed, morose, a hundred leagues from an adventure, exactly
in the mood to let things happen without noticing them. But the end is there, transforming
everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. His moroseness, his money
troubles are much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions.
And the story goes on in the reverse: instants have stopped piling themselves in a lighthearted
way one on top of the other, they are snapped up by the end of the story which draws them and
each one of them in turn, draws out the preceding instant: “It was night, the street was
deserted.” The phrase is cast out negligently, it seems superfluous; but we do not let ourselves
be caught and we put it aside: this is a piece of information whose value we shall subsequently
appreciate. And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations,
promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not
herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in a night
without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make
his choice.
I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered.
You might as well try and catch time by the tail.
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