When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  So here he is, caught between these two infinities, knowing everything except the essential, which means knowing nothing; contemplating innumerable worlds in which his place appears more and more puny.

  Hasn’t it become obvious, from the arts, from the press, from the mood of the people, that human beings are developing a complex?

  Man is no longer ‘the chosen’ … He isn’t even ‘the least of these’ any more.

  He makes use of physical laws that he does not understand and he understands still less – less and less as medicine progresses – what goes on within himself.

  One of my American friends, a doctor, editor of a medical review, professor of medical history, has written a fascinating book: The Antibiotic Saga. It combines the history of the fight against the viruses, the story of their discovery, and, insofar as it is known, the history of the viruses themselves.

  The book reads like an epic. One feels the author’s awe before the infinitely small and, as it were, one even senses a certain envy.

  I am scarcely exaggerating. We are on the way to a virus complex. Especially since the Russian scientists have made it known that these viruses can resist radiations twenty thousand times stronger than those human beings can withstand.

  I am sure that there are millions of human beings today who are more or less consciously depressed by this idea – the idea of a world in which they will no longer exist, and where they will be survived by these entities which as far as we know may be nothing but a chemical compound, and which at this moment we track down more or less successfully.

  The need to be! To be important! Not only as individuals, but as a species. To be here for some purpose. Not by chance or by accident. To be more than just a temporary form of life.

  I wonder if scientists have done right in telling the general public about their discoveries. I even wonder if they themselves can accept their knowledge with serenity!

  One can accept dying of the flu, of a painful cancer, of an automobile accident. Yet one revolts against the idea of a chemical explosion or a natural phenomenon that would sweep us from the earth or destroy the earth with us.

  Halley’s Comet (in 1910, I think?) brought on dozens of suicides.

  When I see a psychiatrist, I must ask him – I am almost sure what he will answer – whether recent discoveries have not filled more psychiatric hospitals than any other causes.

  I would have done better to write my novel!

  Wednesday, 7 December 1960

  Act of Faith

  (if that’s ridiculous, too bad)

  I am happy to have been born at the beginning of the twentieth century. I am quite satisfied with my age. No doubt I would have said the same thing about any other since, unconsciously, I would have been imbued with the ideas and prejudices of that time.

  Of course, I am present and I have been present at events from which I suffer or have suffered. I have known two wars, two occupations, which I consider worse than war. We have known mass assassinations, whether in Germany, Poland, or Hiroshima. Today we are still experiencing political events in which even the least informed people suspect small indecencies or great ones, whether in the East, in the USA, in Africa, or in France. Have the human masses become better (this word must be defined and stripped of its moral sense) and are the leaders, politicians, financiers, or others, less self-interested than before?

  I don’t know at all. I don’t try to know. It seems to me, however, that – being what I am – I would have suffered a great deal more in any other century than in this one. Even in the Great Ages of History, in Egypt, in Greece or in Rome, later in France, in Spain, in Florence or in Venice, in London or in Amsterdam.

  Have we become sentimental? And is that good or bad? Is it a form of degeneration? Have we deviated from our origins and from human evolution and from laws unknown to us which have imbued this evolution?

  I know nothing about that either.

  I am happy to live in our time and I am quite proud of it in spite of its imperfections because:

  Even if brutalities are still committed daily, for the most part brutality is condemned;

  Even if man is not as free as he thinks, slavery has practically ceased to exist;

  Even if questions of race and colour are often nothing but a political platform, hundreds of thousands of men sincerely believe that each human being is human;

  Tens of thousands of young people, all over the world, refuse to kill ‘legally’, refuse to learn to kill and prefer prison to military service;

  If many continue to kill animals for pleasure or vanity, a great number prefer to hunt with a camera, that is to study the animal world rather than to destroy it;

  The American commander who directed the attack on Hiroshima committed suicide ten years later;

  The pilot of the plane that dropped the bomb tried to kill himself twice, and today, after having stolen the most outlandish things, is committed to a psychiatric hospital (to be accurate, he has just escaped).

  The ‘strong’ have a bad conscience and to maintain their position are obliged to protect or pretend to protect the weak;

  Even if social classes still exist, no one, in his heart of hearts, believes in them any more;

  One dares to speak or write without too much fear – of ridicule or prison – things that once were only whispered, at the risk of martyrdom, within certain religious and philosophical sects;

  Man in general has lost his pride and his self-sufficiency and is beginning to realize that he is not the lord of creation, made in the image of a god, but a fraction of a whole which can only be glimpsed by him;

  The scientists, with every new discovery, admit that far from advancing them, it causes them to retreat; in other words, instead of leading to a conclusion, each new discovery poses new questions;

  The …

  And many other reasons, if only small ones, throwing a more or less dim light.

  There remain more ‘in spite ofs’. Why cite them, when they still overwhelm us?

  But those tiny lights growing ever more numerous, and scattered over a continuously expanding part of the earth, are enough to give me hope and even some pride.

  I believe in man.

  Even and above all if he seems to be going against certain biological laws (or what appear to us as such) of natural selection and therefore the elimination of the weak.

  I believe in man even if my reason …

  Sunday, 11 December 1960

  D. and I should leave for Cannes to see our doctor, who as a rule gives us an annual check-up. But because D., especially in the last few days, has had health troubles, we have been staying in a Lausanne clinic since yesterday. D. is in the room I occupied a few months ago when I was operated on. Yesterday, X-rays. Tomorrow kidney and bladder tests, day after tomorrow the stomach, Wednesday, etc.

  My mother used to say to me, as I’ve told in Pedigree:

  ‘If you aren’t good and if you wear me out, they’ll have to take me to the hospital.’

  And she would talk to me about her ‘organs’. I held it against her for a long time. I no longer do because I understand that these were the ideas, the terms, of her time and that lacking a superior intelligence, she could not react otherwise.

  Something is not as it should be in D., something that isn’t serious, as blood tests show, but that has to be tracked down.

  Not only in my mother’s time, but even in 1930, the great doctors admitted that aside from a few exceptional cases (mostly surgical) they could not cure but only help the patient to recover.

  I am speaking of the great ones, because the others, like primitive sorcerers, solemnly played their role of omniscient healer. Some of these are still around.

  Today, medicine often heals. The strange thing is that sometimes it does not know why. It only knows how.

  Some admit it, others don’t. I know I am repeating myself. I’m going in circles, with the intention of reaching the core.

  Yesterday, this morning, this afte
rnoon, de Gaulle is speaking in Algeria. The papers, and not only the French ones, praise his high-mindedness, his clarity, his courage, etc. But let us read his speeches coldly. They are only clichés and false Machiavellianism. A pastiche. There is fighting in the streets of Algiers. He has flattered this one and that one – for two years – and deceived them all.

  Like the doctors in morning coats and top hats (they are gone now, for quite some time) in Harley Street.

  Something to talk about with Johnny, just now. He’s intrigued by it.

  ‘Suppose,’ I’ll say to him, ‘he served them up the truth.’

  To make it clear, I’ll tell him the almost infallible method, if not of winning a woman, at least of making a friend of her: tell her that she is exceptional, that she must have an intense inner life, feel alien among others, etc. No more difficult with a man: he’s strong … a real male … one knows one can depend on him …

  No one accepts being like others. No one accepts the truth.

  Few newspapers, because of the literary prizes, no doubt, mention L’Ours en Peluche. Those who speak of it and praise it nevertheless rate it below what they call my great books: Le Président, Le Fils, for example.

  But in Le Président, there was still a part that was ‘contrived’. I didn’t know how to be real from beginning to end. Nor in Le Fils, in which there is still some of the conventional, ready-made, artificial man.

  All this is linked together. We use electricity, but as I was walking in town day before yesterday I saw that almost everyone is satisfied with a little yellow forty-watt light. I had to change all the bulbs in our room in the clinic to be able to see. Electricity may exist, but with our feelings we cling to gaslight. The same for the rest.

  We discover … we discover … But, basically, we refuse to adapt ourselves to those discoveries. We live ‘as if’ … And to change one small idea, one small habit of the masses, takes decades.

  All this is confused and doesn’t mean much. No more, to me, than the war in Algeria. What is important, at this moment, are D.’s tests, her health, finding the cog that is out of order and restoring balance as quickly as possible.

  There are millions of us in the same condition and still the papers think they thrill us by announcing catastrophes in enormous headlines.

  My wife and my children.

  What good does it do me to get upset if man is not the way I’d like him to be? (By what right? In whose name?)

  Four days ago for the first time I saw D. really suffering, giving in to suffering, without being able to comfort her. That upset me more than a war.

  17 December 1960

  Ouf! A week in the clinic with D., who took all the tests imaginable. I know that she entered against her will, and even, for the first time, with superstitious fear, for many reasons which I understand or guess. She said nothing, showed nothing of all this. She was a brave girl, as they say in the Midi.

  And we left with a weight off our shoulders. Nothing organic. Metabolic troubles. Really exhaustion after a hectic, sometimes agonizing year during which she was spared nothing. Now it is a question of patience and will. In three months, I am sure, it will all be over. But we must be together more often, the two of us.

  A new period is beginning, full of promise.

  If only D. weren’t so scrupulous and did not always want to do everything for everybody, as if it were their due! I would like to change this character trait of hers, as if her character weren’t a whole.

  Because they have created such a goodly number of these Jansenists I have come to hate religious educators, I who hate no one. And all those ostentatiously well-meaning people who do not suffer from their own scruples because these are only superficial, but who often spoil the joy of others who feel more deeply.

  This leads us too far afield and I have always forbidden myself to speak of religion. It is true that this is not so much a matter of religion as of certain religious people.

  Not exactly true, insofar as I’m concerned, nor with regard to D. It is truly Religion and Morality with capitals that spoiled my adolescence, which perhaps left scars on a part of my life, and which almost definitively handicapped D.

  My God, how did anyone dare invent original sin?

  I’ve tried to spare my children that. Have I succeeded? I hope so.

  Marc is coming tonight, with his wife, for less than twenty-four hours. I’ll go bring him from the station a little before midnight, like a guest.

  When I became a father and a long time afterwards, I promised myself always to keep a room in my house for each child, to keep the child from feeling cut off (I think I mentioned the tepid fruit dish before, in which I dealt with this question in a pseudo-poetic form. Seen from the point of view of the son, since I was seventeen at the time). I was naïve. Children eventually need to feel themselves strangers in the paternal house.

  I envy merchants, industrialists, certain craftsmen whose skills can be passed on from father to son. Two generations, sometimes three, work side by side.

  It is a simplistic idea. I know cases of this kind. But I don’t know one that is without friction.

  So? Why must we spend so much of our lives getting rid of ready-made ideas? Why don’t we teach everyone, from children to grown men, to face reality with equanimity? Why create false hopes, baseless enthusiasms, a whole mess of fictitious feelings?

  This is linked to what I wrote about religion.

  Why always turn your back on reality, by God!

  Monday, 19 December 1960

  I feel embarrassed. When I started this notebook I wondered if I would let D. read it, as it went along. Not as with my novels, chapter by chapter as they are finished, in order to discuss them together. But whenever she wanted.

  On the one hand, it would have bothered me to keep these pages secret, since we hide nothing from each other. On the other, as I knew that I would speak about her or about the children, I was afraid that some of my notes would seem to have been written with a purpose.

  But that isn’t what has happened. I don’t want to put anything here that is not completely sincere, or to gloss anything over, for example thoughts that might diminish me in the eyes of others or make me ridiculous. All the more reason for writing nothing here to please.

  I point out that D. will have the right, if this notebook is published some day, to suppress the passages in it that are about her. I don’t want her to, or wish her to, but I insist on giving her this liberty.

  This said, let’s go back to the clinic then, where she underwent a certain number of painful tests. She is going to need to keep, for a certain length of time, to a regimen of half-idleness which, for her, is the worst thing of all.

  Now this is the very moment when I feel a need to write things about her which might seem adapted for the occasion. That’s not the case. If I note them today, it’s because, in the clinic, I thought of her a great deal, about certain characteristics of hers, because I made a sort of assessment and because I must put it on paper before my ideas get out of focus.

  Two or three days ago I spoke of her Jansenism. What I said is both true and false. I could say that even after fifteen years of intimate life with D. every so often I can be wrong about her, for a few hours or a few days, and always in the same way. Then I bristle and I suppose that I become pretty disagreeable.

  What causes it? And why this consistency of error, its regularity, as it were? I think I understand and I would like to explain.

  I’m apt to apply the word ‘perfectionist’ to her. And it is true that she is one. Only, this word can be used for either praise or blame. In any event, it describes only part of her character. And the mystical leanings of a certain period, her adolescence in particular, and the rebellions that preceded and followed this mysticism, are not an adequate explanation either.

  I’ve met many people. I’ve known them, very well, all kinds. But I’ve never seen anyone as tortured as D. by the need to do everything just right. Not only to do everything right, but
to do her utmost. And even more than her utmost.

  A need for intensity, in short. A need to excel, even in the smallest matters of daily life.

  Also a need to exist, to be useful, if not indispensable. To be useful first to her own, of course. To me, to our children. An irrational need, instinctive, to smooth the path for everybody, to solve all his problems, remove all his difficulties.

  This includes the staff for whom she feels responsible, and, in fact, anything in our orbit.

  ‘To take upon oneself the sins of Israel …’

  The phrase flows naturally from my pen.

  I don’t think that this is either to punish herself or to win approval. In any case not to win the approval in the eyes of others. Perhaps in her own? I’m not sure.

  With her it is an instinct. To help. To ease. To remake the world, if she could, so that everyone would be happy.

  Isn’t it natural that occasionally, when I am nervous or ill, I should misinterpret this attitude, should see in it a sort of pride, of personal satisfaction?

  That’s what happens, and afterwards I realize that I was wrong.

  I don’t know if the children will remember, later, the almost animal passion (I’m thinking of a family of gazelles in the jungle) with which their mother brooded over them.

  One day – we had known each other for a short time and were walking in downtown New York – we stopped in front of the window of a pet store. There were dogs, cats, parrots in it. There was in particular a monkey who held her little one against her breast and looked at us fixedly.

  D. could not take her eyes from it, and I have rarely seen her so moved. We stayed in front of the window a long time and I believe that we went back.

  When D. had children, especially when Pierre was sick and she protected him against the world, even against doctors, I found in her once more the same attitude, the same look.