by Edouard Levé
If each event consisted of its beginning, its becoming real, and its completion, you would prefer the beginning because there desire wins out over pleasure. In their beginnings, events preserve the potential that they lose in their completion. Desire prolongs itself so long as it is not achieved. As for pleasure, it signals the death of desire, and soon of pleasure itself. It’s strange that while loving beginnings, you terminated yourself: suicide is an end. Did you consider it a beginning?
You used to play tennis, squash, and ping-pong. You went horseback riding. You swam. You went running. You went sailing. You would walk through town and countryside. You did not play team sports. You preferred to expend your energy alone, without depending on teammates. You liked playing against an opponent, less in order to beat him than to motivate your own efforts. When you would ride on horseback alone in the countryside, or when you swam in the sea, in rivers, in swimming pools, it sometimes happened that you would, in the middle of your exertions, be discouraged by the absurdity of what you were in the process of doing: athletic exertion was vanity. You engaged in it less for the joy of the act than in order to exhaust yourself. Your body, like that of an animal, produced more energy than necessary. The overabundance of force you accumulated would turn against you if it wasn’t depleted. If a week went by without your expending yourself, you would stamp your feet; your muscles would be tense from the moment you woke up and wouldn’t relax until nightfall.
In order to measure the effects of depriving yourself in this fashion, you refrained from exercising for a month. No tennis, no horseback riding, no boating, no swimming, no running, no walking. You became electric. Like an overcharged battery, you risked melting or exploding. Your gestures became faster. You felt clumsy manipulating everyday objects, as though you were handling a complex machine for the first time. Long forgotten nervous tics from childhood reappeared. You extended your arms for no reason ten times in a row, making your elbow joints crack. You stretched out your shoulders, forcing the joints to their limits. You breathed in and out exaggeratedly for five minutes. When you were on your feet, you would stand on tip-toes; you contorted your ankles when speaking to a friend who detained you for too long. In your room you felt the urge to box or kick the air. Your body was trying to cheat by expending its energy despite the immobility you were inflicting on it.
One winter morning, you left your house wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and cross-trainers. You took a path along a river that led away from town and snaked through the countryside. It was eight in the morning; dawn was breaking, mist evaporating. The cold pierced your meager clothing; your hands reddened; your ears were freezing. Your body was fragile, as if you were naked in a freezer. You wondered what masochism drove you to inflict this torture on yourself. But you ran fast and your body heated up again. Soon drops of sweat forming beads on your neck and your thighs irritated your skin. You became out of breath; the icy air penetrated into your lungs, which were spitting out the nicotine caked on their walls. But you persevered. After the painful first twenty minutes, you were overcome with euphoria. You forgot the cold then and the pain of the effort. You believed now that you were able to run without limits; your brain had been invaded by a natural drug secreted by your body. You ran for an hour and a half before thinking of turning back. You got home three hours later, drenched, indifferent to the cold and the pain. It was painful, in fact, for you to stop. You breathed hard in the vestibule, skipping on the spot in order to soften the abrupt end of the run. It was too hot in the house. To go out again would have been useless, your body in the process of reacclimatizing itself could not have withstood the outrageous cold. You moved from one room to another. You came across a mirror; your face was covered with red and yellow blotches. You approached the mirror; you recognized your physiognomy, but it seemed to belong to someone else. Fatigue disassociated you from yourself. You looked at the furniture and objects around you. They should have been familiar; they were strangers to you. You picked up a dictionary; you opened it at random and fell on the word Fraction, for which you read the definition. Words were abstract paintings. You recognized the letters; you put them together to make harmonious sounds, but no meaning emanated from the sentences you read. The text was opaque like a monochrome surface. You closed the dictionary again and picked up a piece of candy that had left itself on a shelf. You removed its wrapper and put it in your mouth. A strong taste of mint irrigated your palate and spread through your lungs. This pepperminty assault made you cough; you sat down in an armchair; you closed your eyes and lolled backwards to rest your head. Blood beat strong through your heart. Heavier than usual. Your veins and your arteries seemed too narrow. Your flesh was loud. It didn’t produce music, but a sickening pulsation, and you waited for the abatement of this rhythm. Your neck was sawed at by the wooden backrest it was resting on. You got up. Changing position made you dizzy. White spots gathered on the surface of your eyes. They masked the décor; the furniture disappeared. Just as you were about to faint, a chill ran down your spine. The white spots blurred, objects faded back in, like in a slideshow, but they felt no more real than the spots. You dropped onto the sofa; its velvet caressed you, but no memories accompanied this sensation. Your memory seemed to have been eradicated. You moved toward a photograph of your wife on a bookshelf. You looked at it with indifference, as if it were a portrait of a stranger put up in a photo booth. While you were worrying about your lack of feeling, you heard steps on the parquet. You turned around; it was your wife who was telling you about a dinner to which you had both been invited the following week, and which she supposed you would refuse to attend. A refusal fell out of your mouth before you had thought about what you wanted to say. Your wife showed astonishment at your abruptness, but all you could see was an abstract grimace. It really was her, you recognized her, but you wondered if you knew her. She was abstract like the other objects in the depths from which her silhouette emerged. She was looking at you, she was expecting a reaction from you, but your face remained inexpressive. The physical excess of the run had plunged you into a waking sleep from which you couldn’t wake. Whatever was happening between your temples and between your eyes and the back of your skull no longer belonged to you. You were guided by automatic physical reactions. You then headed toward the bathroom to take a shower. The cold of the tiles under your feet, the smell of soap, the hot water that streamed onto your skull didn’t succeed in bringing you out of your torpor. You lay down after the shower, but sleep didn’t come. You were separated from yourself, so relaxed as to be without sensation. Your indifference should have made you afraid, but you were indifferent to indifference. You got up, you dressed, and you rejoined your wife for lunch. At the table, you reacted to her conversation with vague, pat phrases that implied no response. You passed the day like a sleepwalker, till nightfall. When you turned on the lights, seven hours had passed since your run. You started to wake up. Your physical expenditure had exhausted you. You decided, in the future, to economize your efforts so that they wouldn’t backfire. You would have to feel out the right amount of exercise, so that it would relax you without annihilating you.
Your end was premeditated. You had conceived of a scenario where your body would be found immediately after your death. You didn’t want it to stay there decomposing for days, for it to be found rotten like that of some forgotten hermit. You did violence to your living body, but you didn’t want it to be found, in death, victim to degradations other than those you had inflicted on it yourself. You made sure to appear to your wife, and to those who would carry your body away, in the way you had planned.
You spoke little, but with precision, and with passion when speaking to someone you knew. You weren’t urbane. At a party, you wouldn’t head toward strangers to start up a conversation. You became acquainted with new people if they spoke to you. Though you knew how to speak with whomever you wanted, you preferred asking questions to making assertions. You could listen endlessly to someone answering your questions, or to several people spea
king together on a subject that you had brought up. Not liking to speak about yourself in public, your questions allowed you to hide yourself behind the position of listener.
At night you perceived the flow of time less. Urbane duties were again put off until the next day. No social act needed to be undertaken; there was nothing to distract you from yourself any longer. You became contemplative without guilt, and without any limits beyond your fatigue.
Over the course of your sleepless nights, eyes closed, time did away with itself, thoughts and scenarios looped through your brain with the regularity of a clock. Like an adult looking at a merry-go-round designed for children, you observed the spinning of your reveries. They brought buried memories back to your consciousness, which disappeared the moment you recognized them and reappeared at the next turn before disappearing anew. You watched scenes unfurl, a passive spectator, as though at a film. By dint of being repeated, the actions you saw lost their meaning. You couldn’t have said how long each scene lasted, nor how long you spent watching them. You wouldn’t turn on the light in order to check the time, but when day broke through the shutters, you believed you hadn’t slept a moment since going to bed. Your wife affirmed to you, however, on waking, that she had heard you murmur incomprehensible phrases in your sleep. You had slept without perceiving it. You confused sleep with wakefulness.
You told me two of your dreams. In the first, you hold in your hand a pink card on which is written in red italics, The Eternal Roe-Deer. You understand the coded message; it is a wedding invitation from an old friend with whom you have been out of touch for the past ten years. The wedding takes place that very day in Finland. A helicopter sets you down above a fjord. Below, tables are set and assembled people greet you from afar as an important guest. You hear all their conversations distinctly and simultaneously, even though they are taking place three hundred meters down below. You look again at the invitation card, which is enough to transport you to the middle of the party, where all the women are your former lovers. At five o’clock, the parents of the newlyweds undress and dive into the fjord. The guests follow suit. The water has a taste of sweetened gooseberry and is breathable. In this ideal amniotic liquid, you make love with your former lovers, one after the other. They love each other as much as you love them.
In the second dream, you try to escape an armed man who is following you through an opera house over the course of a performance of Norma. You fight violently, starting up again several times, but neither of you gets the upper hand, except at the end of the performance, when your adversary manages to force you into a small room that hangs over the auditorium, and where “a very unusual man, who will be happy to meet you” is waiting for you. In this room there are computers and video screens. The man is mostly turned away from you, you don’t see his face. It’s not until you come closer, circling around him, that you discover, terrified, that it’s not a man, but an android robot of yellow chromed metal. It looks at you with cold eyes, shows you to your seat, and starts a video where you are seen on an operating table, confident, yawning as you fall asleep under the effects of the anesthetic. Surgical implements—in fact, instruments of torture—come down from box beams concealed in the ceiling. An articulated arm that has several needles on it reaches out toward your testicles, which a mechanical hand has just ligatured. You realize that, in the recent past, you’ve been kidnapped and operated upon without your knowledge.
You preferred the first dream, but the pleasure you felt having the one and the unease with which you dived into the other did nothing to alter the charm of recalling them. Dream or nightmare, what did it matter, if you could experience the confusion of reliving, while awake, the memory of things lived in sleep.
You left one day to walk along a beach in Normandy at low tide with your brother and sister. You were barefoot, in a bathing suit. The immense stretch of sand and water resembled a desert. It was during the week, in the off-season. There was nothing to do other than to walk, to look at the sea in the distance and the houses along the coast. While you remained silent and contemplative, your thoughts tossed here and there by the rhythm of your steps, your brother and your sister talked among themselves. They told each other funny stories, invented simple games, ran laughing, jumped in pools where they tried to catch shrimp and little fish with their hands. You didn’t join in their games. You thought of things unrelated to the setting in which you found yourself. This landscape was not, for you, a place to live, but a backdrop in which to float. You looked at your brother and sister; their bodies were alike, but you resembled neither. They were so happy together that they didn’t wonder why you were distant. You were their older brother, you had seen them be born and grow up. To be reminded of the differences that separated you gave you the impression of being a stranger to your family.
One July, when you were seventeen years old, you had dinner with some friends of your mother in the garden in front of the house. The table was set in front of the big open doors of the living room, on the old slabs of stone that marked the threshold of the vegetable garden. Among the six guests was a psychoanalyst, about fifty years old. You took it upon yourself to bring out the dishes that your mother had prepared. The kitchen was far away, you had to cross the old kitchen, the entrance, go along a hallway, and then pass through a small living room as well as the main living room in order finally to arrive at the table set in the place that you had chosen. You rarely dined there, your mother preferred the convenience of the dining room, and she was afraid of the cold when night fell. But you liked the view of the vegetable garden. The central path divided into three after about fifteen meters, and the side paths gave the garden the air of a nursery labyrinth. You had set down some candles on the table, in anticipation of evening. When it came, you lit them and they spread a soft light over the faces of the guests. The conversation was relaxed, you tasted the simple happiness of an agreeable meal in the company of intelligent adults. You participated in their exchanges, you were encouraged in your reasoning, which was thought to be quite daring for someone of your age. The psychoanalyst applied the following phrase to someone of whom you had spoken, who would endlessly apologize to justify the mistakes he made: “A self excused is a self accused.” When the time for dessert came, you went to the kitchen to look for the strawberry charlotte you had spent several hours making. You served the guests one by one, ending with yourself. You reflected on what the psychoanalyst had said and delayed tasting the dessert. The guests ate it slowly, in small spoonfuls, without saying anything. No one complimented you, as you would have expected them to do. You understood why after your first spoonful. The charlotte was salty. You then said: “But how could I have been such an idiot as to confuse sugar with salt?” The psychoanalyst retorted: “A self accused is a self excused.”
You dreaded the boredom of being alone, as well as the boredom of being with several people. But most of all you dreaded two-person boredom, the face-to-face. You attributed no virtue whatsoever to moments of waiting, moments without anything perceptible at stake. You believed that only action and thought, which seemed absent here, carry life. You underestimated the value of passivity, which is not the art of pleasing but of placing oneself. Being in the right place at the right time requires accepting long moments of boredom, passed in gray spaces. Your impatience deprived you of the art of succeeding by being bored.
It was eight in the evening when you arrived with your wife at Christophe’s garden for a barbeque with friends you knew during high school. You hadn’t kept up contact with anyone from that era except for him. You no longer socialized with any of the people reunited this evening, but, thinking back on them the night before, you were excited by the memories that came back to you. You thought that seeing them again would reunite past years and the future prospect of seeing them, in the present.