536
PARTISAN REVIEW
door. What disturbs me is not the noise but the banality of the
conversation (if at least he talked in some language unknown to me,
and a musical one!). I am always amazed, even flabbergasted by the
resistance of others: for me, the Other is the Indefatigable. Energy-and
especially verbal energy-stupefies me: this is perhaps the only time
(aside from violence) when I believe in madness.
July
16, 1977
Again, after overcast days, a fine morning: lustre and subtlety of
the atmosphere: a cool, luminous silk. This blank moment (no
meaning) produces the plenitude of an evidence: that it is worth-while
being alive. The morning errands (to the grocer, the baker, while the
village is still almost deserted), are something I wouldn 't miss for
anything in the world.
M
other feeling better today. She is sitting in the garden, wearing a
big straw hat. As soon as she feels a little better, she is drawn by the
house, filled with the desire to participate; she puts things away, turns
off the furnace during the day (which I never do).
This afternoon, a sunny, windy day, the sun already setting, I
burnt garbage at the bottom of the garden. A complete course of
physics to follow; armed with a long bamboo pole, I stir the heaps of
paper which slowly burn up; it takes patience-who would have
guessed how long paper can resist the fire? On the other hand, the
emerald-green plastic bag (the garbage-bag itself) burns very fast,
leaving
no
trace:
it literally vanishes. This phenomenon might serve,
on many an occasion, as a metaphor.
Incredible incidents (read in the
Sud-Ouest or
heard on the radio? I
don't remember): in Egypt, it has been decided to execute those
Moslems who convert to another religion. In the USSR, a French agent
was expelled because she gave a present of underwear to a Soviet friend.
Compile a contemporary dictionary of intolerance (literature, in this
case Voltaire, cannot be abandoned, so long as the evils subsist to
which it bears witness).
July
17, 1977
As if Sunday morning intensifies the good weather. Two hetero–
elite intensities reinforce each other.
I never mind doing the cooking. I like the
operations
involved. I
take pleasure in observing the changing forms of the food as they occur
(colorations, thickenings, contractions, crystallizations, polarizations,
etc.). There is something a little perverse about this observation. On the
other hand, what
1
can't do, and what I always do badly, are propor-
