ROLAND BARTHES
535
discourage the miracle. In
Ordet
the madman did not speak, refused the
garrulous and peremptory language of inwardness. Then what is this
incapacity for faith? Perhaps a very human love? Love, then, excludes
faith? And vice-versa?
Gide's old age and death (which I read about in Mme van
Rysselberghe's
Cahiers de la Petite Dame)
were surrounded by wit–
nesses. But I do not know what has become of these witnesses: no
doubt, in most cases, dead in their turn: There is a time when the
witnesses themselves die without witnesses. Thus History consists of
tiny explosions of life, of deaths without relays. Our human impotence
with regard to transition, to any science of degrees. Conversely, we can
attribute to the classical God the capacity to see an infinity of degrees:
"God" as the absolute Exponential.
(Death, real death, is when the witness himself dies. Chateaubri–
and says of his grandmother and his great-aunt: "I may be the only
man in the world who knows that such persons have existed": yes, but
since he has written this, and written it well, we know it too, insofar, at
least, as we still read Chateaubriand.)
July
14, 1977
A little boy-nervous, excited, like any number of French kids,
who so quickly pretend to be grown up, is dressed up as a musical–
comedy grenadier (red and white); doubtless he will precede the band.
Why is Worry harder to bear here than in Paris?-This village is a
world so natural, so exempt from any extravagance, that the impulses
of sensibility seem entirely out of place. I am excessive, hence excluded.
It seems to me I learn more about France during a walk through
the village than in whole weeks in Paris. Perhaps an illusion? The
realist
illusion? The rural, village, provincial world constitutes the
traditional raw material of realism. To be a writer meant, in the
nineteenth century, to write
from
Paris
about
the provinces. The
distance makes
everything signify.
In Paris, in the street, I am bom–
barded with information-not with signification.
July
15, 1977
A t five in the afternoon, how calm the house is, here in the
country. Flies. My legs ache a little, the way they did when I was a child
and had what was called growing pains-or when I was getting the
grippe. Everything is still, peaceful, asleep. And as always, the sharp
awareness, the vivacity of my own "seediness" (a contradiction in
terms).
X
visits: in the next room, he talks endlessly. I do not dare close the
