HAPPENINGS
533
the students, but also hundreds of workers emerging from their silence,
petit-bourgeois, technicians, schoolmasters, engineers, and research work–
ers - sucked in by the irresistible movement of words, tried to give
themselves an identity by mastering words, those words which destroy
as well as those which order and create. There is no one who doesn't
use - or abuse - the word "creator," who doesn't babble about a pro–
ject having to do with reforming relations and structures, in these
times of kermesse madness (all this of course the result of cultural and
philosophical assimilation). To hear students discussing
DEtre
and
L'Avair
for over five hours in a lecture hall of the Sorbonne; to hear
them repeating the mottoes of the Nicholites of the Middle Ages who
walked barefoot and shared all their worldly goods; to watch them
considering "being" as infinitely noble and "having" as infinitely repre–
hensible (contrary to all the marxisms of affluence, of production,
of the "frigidaire") - this was to witness something more than a show.
It came close to embodying the values of a culture (which in its own
time was called aristocratic, esoteric, decadent ) . Was it not Valery who
rejoiced to see himself translated into action, he who valued above all
efficiency, and the supremely regulated and constructive gesture? Com–
pare here the key phrase, the obsession with possessing of the world in
Kasper:
"I would like to become such a one, as another has once al–
ready been." Compare again Kasper's education in action by thought,
the stages of his humanization through the combination of words and
phrases.
And although they have been accused of simply having gregarious
instincts, didn't those demonstrators in Paris the 13th of May feel that
sudden private illumination in the midst of public solidarity which
reveals as much in expressions of gratitude to those who were "with us,"
as in outbursts of irrepressible foul-mouthedness toward those who be–
trayed them? In the past, one thing which always characterized large
demonstrations organized formally "from above," was that they took
place amid general boredom and with an inevitable feeling of alienation
and distaste. The students certainly shared this feeling when they said:
"we reject a world in which the certainty of not dying of hunger is
exchanged for the risk of dying of boredom." And that observation itself
suggests the sustained poetry of the revolutions of youth: permanent
humor, joy in new beginnings, seriousness, and in the face of potential
violence, a sense of responsibility and in the face of chaos a refusal to
participate in useless destruction.
Contradictions abound. The very night of the occupation of the
Sorbonne, one of the first items on the agenda was the re-painting of the
