The Difficulty of Being

by Jean Cocteau

  It is possible that I shall wake up one fine day without feeling pain in any limb and I may be utterly mistaken in my prognosis. That would be all to the good, but I prefer to be a pessimist. I have always been one, from optimism. I always hoped too much not to put myself on guard against disillusion.

  The doctors had ordered me mountains and snow. This, they said, is the only effective medicine. My germs would disappear as if by magic. I did not believe them. These germs, whether of the animal or vegetable kingdom, are as remote from me as the stars. I feel them. They do not know me. I do not know them any better, and the microscope examines me without understanding them, as the telescope examines the sky. They seem, on the contrary, to like high places and the snow. I have already remarked on this. It pleases them that I should breathe, sleep, eat, walk, that I put on weight. They live on me. I am their god whom they torment, and Marcel Jouhandeau is right in saying that men make God suffer. Sometimes I say to myself: ‘God thinks us. He does not think about us.’ And my germs become active. And I suffer. And I think about this. And I tell myself that God suffers by reason of his worlds. That he will so suffer without end.

  I can sleep when I am ill. Sleep anaesthetizes me. On waking I think that I am no longer suffering. This lasts for a flash. Another flash brings the pain back where it was. Last night the pain was so acute that sleep did not work. The germs were devouring my right hand. When I touched my face, I felt a crusty mask under which they live and radiate at top speed. Now they have reached my chest. There they are tracing out that red constellation I know so well. I wonder if the sun does not exacerbate this tribe of darkness and if yesterday’s sunshine has not something to do with this attack. What an exhausting hunt! What swift game! The doctors prescribe for me weapons that do not kill. Ointments, spirits, vaccines. I give up. Doubtless what is needed is death, that is to say an end to the world.

  Apart from the pain, what keeps on nagging at me is the scheme of these creatures in relation to myself. I should like to know how long their centuries last, how many generations succeed one another in them, if they live under a monarchy or a republic, their means of transport, their pleasures, the style of their buildings, the objects of their labours. It is intolerable to be the habitation of a tribe whose customs one does not know. Why last night were they working between the fingers of my right hand? Why this morning do they leave them in peace and toil at my chest, so immensely far from my fingers? Nothing but enigmas of which I am the object and which rub my nose in my ignorance. Perhaps last night I was the scene of a Hundred Years War. One war alone is waged in the world. The world takes it for several. The pauses seem to it to be the normal state of mankind, that is to say peace. Probably the same is true for my germs; that my attacks are long wars and their short periods of rest are peace. From where I view them the war never stops. From where they view themselves there are several wars, quite disconnected, divided by several periods of peace.

  Last night I suffered so much that there was nothing but my pain to distract me from my pain. I had to make it my sole diversion and with good reason. It had thus decreed. It attacked at every point. Then it distributed its troops. It encamped. It so manoeuvred that it was no longer intolerable at any one of its positions, but tolerable at them all. That is to say that the intolerable being distributed, it was this no longer, except as a whole. It was something both tolerable and intolerable. The organ that breaks down and the final chord that goes on for ever. A great, full, rich pain, sure of itself. A balance of pain to which I had to get used, cost what it may.

  My concern then became to condition myself to it little by little. The least rebellion might excite it and increase its anger. I had to accept as a privilege its victory, its retinue, its trenches, its tents, its camps, its sleepers, its fires.

  At about nine o’clock it ended its preparations: marches and strategic movements. At ten everything was in order. It was in occupation.

  This morning it seems to be holding its horses. But the sun is out for the second time since I have been living on the mountain. What to do? Should I avoid this sunlight or use it as a secret weapon against the sleeping army? Should I take it by surprise? Should I let it sleep?

  The last time the sun came out I risked the attack. True, the germ population was astir. Was it afraid of the red sky which I became for its night? There was frightful chaos on the roads, jostling of men, rearing of beasts. The pain changed its position, became intense, ceased to be so, flew elsewhere. My eyes swelled, wrinkled, made pockets. Under my arms a small tribe seemed to be seeking refuge.

  Medicine remains powerless in face of these problems. One must suffer until the warriors slaughter one another, until the race is exhausted, until there is nothing left but rubble. No more than among mankind is there any remedy for this frenzy of destruction.

  What is amazing is the dispatch with which my troops move from one end of Europe to the other. What am I saying? From the moon to the earth, from the earth to Mars.

  If the germs merely wanted to feed on my body, they would cultivate their farms and not become restive. It seems, then, that they must know the hatreds of patriotism, the pride of great powers, the frenzy for living space—the dole, oil trusts, hegemony. It is impossible for me not to notice the similarities between the menaces in the newspapers of 1946 and the disturbances of which I am the universe. I was speaking of God. Without going as far as him, I pity the world if it experiences what I experience, if it must suffer a return of the canker, when it was hoping for rest.

  Yesterday evening, and without doubt as a result of the sunshine I had absorbed, the carapace on my forehead began to run, a watery fluid varnished it, made it greasy, and if I mopped it up, it ran harder than ever.

  Next my neck began to run in the same way. In the night all this became covered, developing as it dried a follicular crust. My eyes swelled up, above, below, until I could no longer see, and the skin of my face burned as if I had been struck by a back-flash.

  These phenomena have kept me awake all night, and in an ineptness in which I was at a loss what to do.

  This morning my face is still gilded by the sun, but it seems to be powdered with yellow and under my eyes are deep lines which make a ridge from one to the other.

  Moreover I felt torturing pain between the fingers of my right hand. My armpits gave me no peace.

  On my neck I have an oozing sore. Such is the catalogue of disaster. I could almost laugh at it, if the incomprehensible and even the miraculous did not always produce in me a disgust that prevents this. All of which does not alter the fact that I am better, that I am benefiting from the height and the food, which is excellent in this hotel. Germs or no germs, this army of parasites fights between the derm and the epiderm, near the surface, disfigures me, torments me and does not penetrate. This, at least as far as I can observe, is the site of their manoeuvres, for if they were to penetrate, I can scarcely imagine what ravages they would not cause in my system.

  Yesterday, in spite of this upheaval, I wrote some poems. Except for La Crucifixion, which I should have written long ago and which was, in a sense, already written inside me, I had not felt any urge to do so. And anyone who has read this book knows that I am most careful not to force the issue. So yesterday it was a surprise for me to feel the urge and not be able to escape from it. The machinery ran easily, difficult though it was, for it was a matter (I was careful not to exert any influence over this) of false internal rhymes, sometimes going from the end of one word to the beginning of another; of almost inaudible sonorities, of very marked peculiarities, of platitudes doubtless apt for throwing them into relief. These poems dealt with the snow which I have before my eyes, but in an allusive form in which it can scarcely be divined.

  About seven o’clock, at the height of my attack, I tried to distract myself from it and to get on with my harvest. The machinery had ceased to run and actually made fun of me, forcing me to imitate it in a feeble sort of way. I kept quiet and went no further.

  Rereadi
ng these poems, I am astonished at their complete break with La Crucifixion. Verses of a somewhat pedantic nature, because what I am after or think I am after, or what is being dictated to me in large handwriting, is a penance for having allowed myself to be too much seduced by the cinematograph and other frivolous pastimes.

  I am never tired of examining that phenomenon in which we appear to be so free and are, if the truth were told, without a shadow of freedom. All the same this shadow exists. It half conceals our work from us. It keeps an eye on us. It holds us balanced between itself and the light, and the word penumbra would suit it better. While I am examining it (or examining myself) I suffer. I have been wrought by this suffering for seven months, as a piece of gold is wrought by a goldsmith. It must surely be putting its tongue out over the task. It did me a good turn. I stirred, therefore I slept. A man of my nature does not bestir himself thus unless he is dreaming. Theatre, drawings, films all were to me pretexts for this constant movement in which one’s spirit whirls around, leaving no deposit. I shook my bottle. That is enough to sour the wine.

  Suffering has put the brake on me. Despite any efforts to overcome it with fatigue and the giddy round, the day always comes when it orders us to be quiet and keep still. In hospital my eyes were not yet open to this. My poems about the snow, this book about myself, these ink-stained pages, this room of study, instead of the emptiness to which I should have confined myself (medical advice being: think of nothing), are like a good form of silence. That is how I choose to interpret them. This is the only form of ‘think of nothing’ that I can manage. With this mist and these Alps before me I panic at the thought of having risked another. That prescribed by the doctors.

  ON DEATH

  I HAVE PASSED THROUGH TIMES SO INTOLERABLE that death has seemed to me a delicious thing. So I have formed the habit of not fearing her* and of looking her straight in the face.

  Paul Eluard astonished me when he told me he was frightened to see me defying death in the part of the Baron Fantôme, in which I dissolve into dust. To live disconcerts me more than to die. I did not see Garros dead nor Jean Le Roy, nor Raymond Radiguet nor Jean Desbordes. My mother, Jean de Polignac, Jean Giraudoux, Edouard Bourdet, are the dead with whom I have lately been connected. Except for Jean de Polignac I made drawings of them all, and was left alone in their rooms for a long time. I looked at them very closely in order to follow their lines. I touched them, I admired them. For death takes trouble with her statues. She smooths away their wrinkles. However much I said to myself that they were not concerned with what concerns me, that sickening distances separated them from me, I felt that we were quite close, like the two sides of a coin which cannot know each other, but are only separated from each other by the thickness of the metal.

  If I were not sad at forsaking the people I love and who can still hope for something from me, I would wait with curiosity for the shadow, worn at the onset of death, to touch and foreshorten me. I should not enjoy the coup de grâce and the lengthy business leading up to the point where she has merely to finish us off. I should like to bid farewell to my nearest and dearest and to see my work rejoice to take my place.

  Nothing about death disgusts me except the pomp with which it is accompanied. Funerals disturb my memories. At Jean Giraudoux’s I said to Lestringuez: ‘Let’s go. He never turned up.’ I imagined him playing at some pin-table in a cellar of the Palais-Royal.

  Bourdet’s was icy. It was freezing and the photographers climbed into the pulpit to photograph us and flash their magnesium.

  My mother’s death dealt gently with me. She had no ‘second’ childhood. She returned to her own, saw me in mine, thought I was at school, talked to me in detail about Maisons-Laffitte and was not troubled. Death had only to smile at her and take her hand. But the Montmartre cemetery, which is ours, offends me. They park us like motor cars. The drunks who cross the bridge piss down on us.

  Yesterday I visited a mountain cemetery. It was under snow and had few graves. It had a commanding view of the Alpine range. Ridiculous as it seems to me to choose one’s last resting-place, I thought of my hole in Montmartre and I felt sorry not to be able to be buried here.

  After the death of Jean Giraudoux I published a farewell letter which ended: ‘I shall not be long in joining you.’ I was taken to task for this remark, which was considered pessimistic, bearing the stamp of despondency. It was nothing of the kind. I meant to say that even if I am to last until I am a hundred it is only a few minutes. But few people are willing to admit this, or that we are whiling away our time playing cards in an express which is hurtling towards death.

  Since Mother Angélique† dreaded death at Port-Royal, who then will find it a blessing? As well await death without flinching. It is flattery to think of nothing but her, ungracious to apologize for living as if life were a mistake of death’s. What will those people say who imprison themselves in a cell and anxiously examine the documents of their trial? The Court will give them no credit for doing so. It has already reached its verdict. They will only have wasted their time.

  How admirable the attitude of one who has made good use of the time granted him and who did not interfere by trying to be his own judge.‡ Duration of human life belongs to those who mould each moment, sculpture it and do not trouble about the verdict.

  On the subject of death there is still much for me to say, and I am amazed that so many people are troubled by her, since she is within us every second and should be accepted with resignation. How should one have such great fear of a person with whom one cohabits, who is closely mingled with our own substance? But there it is. One has grown used to making a fable of her and to judging her from outside. Better to tell oneself that at birth one marries her and to make the best of her disposition, however deceitful it may be. For she knows how to make herself forgotten and to let us believe that she no longer inhabits the house. Each one of us houses his own death and reassures himself by what he invents about her—namely that she is an allegorical figure only appearing in the last act.

  Expert at camouflage, when she seems to be furthest from us, she is our very joy of living. She is our youth. She is our growth. She is our loves.

  The shorter I get, the longer she grows. The more she makes herself at home. The more she bestirs herself about this and that. The more she devotes herself to trivial details. Less and less does she take the trouble to deceive me.

  But her glory is when one ceases to be. She can go out, and she locks us in.

  * I have kept ‘Death’ in the feminine throughout this chapter. E.S.

  † Angélique Arnauld, 1591–1661, Abbess of the Abbey of Port-Royal. E.S.

  ‡ It needs the thundering genius of Chateaubriand for me to endure Rancé. (Abbé Armand de Rancé, reformer, 1626–1700. E.S.)

  ON FRIVOLITY

  FRIVOLITY IS A CRIME IN THAT IT APES LIGHTNESS, that, for instance, of a fine March morning in the mountains. It leads to that disorder, invisibly unclean, worse than any other disorder, fatal to the harmonious functioning of the constitution (like eczema) through the almost pleasurable itch induced on the derm of the intelligence, by the fantaisiste, that rascal so readily confused with a poet.

  If you consult Larousse you will see there that Rimbaud is a poète fantaisiste, and there is a certain redundancy in the intent of the one guilty of this insertion. For most people a poet is necessarily a fantaisiste, unless the most dubious lyricism or bogus profundity earn him a respect that matches his vapidity.

  Frivolity is nothing but a lack of heroism and a kind of refusal to give oneself away in any respect. It is a flight mistaken for a dance, a slowness seeming a swiftness, a heaviness appearing like this lightness of which I am speaking and which is only met with in souls that are profound.

  It may happen that certain circumstances, for instance Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment, open the criminal’s eyes to his crime and force him to repent of it. Then he will admit that ‘all that is understood is right, all that is not understood is wrong,’ but
he only admits it because he is made aware of it by discomfort. The same is true of Pascal’s accident in his carriage.* One cannot imagine without horror a spirit of his quality in love with itself and with life to the point of attaching such extraordinary importance to being saved from death.†

  I accuse of frivolity anyone who is able to apply himself to solving problems of local interest without the least sense of absurdity, a sense that might make him think, and direct his efforts towards a peace, for instance, instead of a war. For unless he is criminally frivolous, this dangerous person only finds excuses in personal interest, whether for profit or for fame. And patriotism is a poor excuse, since there is more nobility in displeasing the masses who are its dupes than in duping them in the name of greatness.

  Frivolity, already odious when it works on a superficial level, since there are in that field heroes of a charming lightness spoilt by frivolity (certain Stendhal characters among others), becomes monstrous when it proliferates to the point of tragedy and, through the easy charm it exerts over all lazy minds, entices the world on to ground where true seriousness seems like a childishness which must give way to the circle of grown-ups.

  So one has to witness, helplessly, all that frenzy of catastrophes, of red tape, of controversies, of murders, of trials, of debris, of murderous toys, at the end of which the hideous frivolity of man comes to itself again, dazed, stupefied, in the midst of a disorder, as when children slash pictures, put moustaches on busts, throw the cat into the fire and upset the bowl of goldfish.

  True, frivolity soon raises its head again, not wishing to believe itself guilty under any circumstances. This is the stage at which the family bickers in a corner of the drawing-room while the furniture is being removed, when feverish grievances prevent its members from noticing that the pieces of furniture are disappearing one after the other and that there is not even a chair left to sit on.