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by the distraught desire to endure and to possess wishes, for the
beings that he loves, sterility or death. This is the true revolt. Those
who have not demanded, at least for one day, the absolute purity
of the world and other beings, who have not trembled with nostal–
gia and impotence before this impossibility, who have not destroyed
themselves in a love that continually throws them back on their
nostalgia for the absolute-these will never be able to understand
the reality of revolt .and its fury of destruction. But other beings
are always escaping us, and we are escaping them; they are with–
out fixed contours. Life, from this point of view, is without style.
It
is nothing but a movement unsuccessfully pursuing its form.
Man, thus torn apart, seeks in vain for a form to give him limits
within which he can be king. Let just one living thing have its
form in this world, and he will be reconciled!
There is no being, finally, who, starting from an elementary
level of consciousness, does not exhaust himself seeking formulas
or attitudes that will give his existence the unity it lacks. Whether
in pretending or in acting, the dandy or the revolutionary both
require a unity of being, and of being in this world. Like those
pathetic and miserable love affairs, which sometimes drag on in–
terminably because one of the partners is waiting to find the word,
the gesture, the situation that will make the adventure a thing of
the past-ended in just the right way-each one of us creates or
gives himself an epigraph.
It
is not enough to live; one must have
a destiny-and without waiting for death. It is thus true to say
that man has the idea of a world better than the present one. But
better does not mean different; better means unified. That fever
which impels the heart beyond our scattered world-a world, how–
ever, which it cannot do without- is the fever of unity. It does not
finish up as a mediocre escape but as the most obstinate reclama–
tion. Religion or crime, all human effort finally obeys this irrational
desire and pretends to give human life a form it does not possess.
The same movement that can lead to the adoration of Heaven or
the destruction of man can also lead to the creation of novels; and
this gives the latter activity its seriousness.
What is a novel, indeed, if not that universe where action finds
its form, where the final words are spoken, where beings are given
