ROLAND BARTHES
537
tions and schedules: I put in too much oil, afraid everything will burn;
I leave things too long on the fire, afraid they won't be cooked through.
In short, I'm afraid
because I don't know
(how much, how long).
Whence the security of a code (a kind of guaranteed knowledge): I'd
rather cook rice than potatoes because I know it takes seventeen
minutes. This figure delights me, insofar as it's precise (to the point of
being preposterous); a round number would seem contrived and just to
be certain, I'd add to it.
July
18, 1977
Mother's birthday. A III can offer her is a rosebud from the garden;
at least it's the only one, and the first one since we're here. Tonight,
M.
is coming for dinner and will cook the dinner itself: soup and a
pimento omelette; she brings champagne and almond cookies from
Peyrehorade. Mme
L.
has sent flowers from her garden, delivered by
one of her daughters.
Moods,
in the strong, Schumannian sense: a broken series of
contradictory impulses: waves of anxiety, imaginations of the worst,
and unseasonable euphorias. This morning, at the core of Worry, a
crystal of happiness: the weather (very fine, very light, and dry), the
music (Haydn), coffee, a cigar, a good pen, the household noises (the
human subject as caprice: such discontinuity alarms, exhausts).
July
19, 1977
Early in the morning, coming back with the milk, I stop in the
church to have a look around. It has been remodelled according to the
prescribed New Look: now it resembles nothing so much as a Protes–
tant establishment (only the wooden galleries indicate a Basque
tradition); no image, the altar has become a simple table. No cand le of
course: too bad, no?
Around six in the evening, I doze on my bed. The window is wide
open, the gray day has lifted now. I experience a certain floating
euphoria: everything is liquid, aerated,
drinkable
(I drink the air, the
moment, the garden). And since I happen to be reading Suzuki, it
seems to me that I am quite close to the state that Zen calls
sabi; or
again (since I am also reading Blanchot), to the "fluid heaviness" he
speaks of apropos of Proust.
July
21, 1977
Some bacon, onions, thyme, etc.: simmering, the smell is wonder–
ful. Now this fragrance is not that of food as it will be served at table.
There is an odor of what is eaten and an odor of what is prepared
(observation for the "Science of Motley,"
or
"diaphorology").
