538
PARTISAN REVIEW
July
22, 1977
For some years, a unique project, apparently: to explore
my
own
stupidity,
or
better still: to
utter
it, to make it the object of
my
books. In
this way
1
have already
ullered my
"egoist" stupidity and
my
"lover's"
stupidity. There remains a third kind, which
1
shall someday have to
get on paper: political stupidity. What
1
think of events politically (and
I never fail to think something), from day to day, is stupid. It is a
stupidity which I should now
uller
in the third book of this little
trilogy: a kind of
Political Diary.
It would take enormous courage, but
maybe this would exqrcise that mixture of boredom, fear and indigna–
tion which the Politician (or rather Politics) constitutes for me.
I
is harder to write than to read.
Last night, at
Casino,
the Anglet supermarket, with E.M., we were
fascinated by this Babylonian Temple of Merchandise. It is really the
Golden Calf: piles of (cheap) "wealth," gathering of the tribes (classi–
fied by types), Noah's ark of
things
(Swedish clogs to eggplants),
predatory stacking of carts. We are suddenly convinced that people will
buy anything (as I do myself): each cart, while parked in front of the
cash register, is the shameless chariot of manias, impulses, perversions,
and cravings: obvious, confronting a cart proudly passing before us,
that there was no
need
to buy the cellophane-wrapped pizza ensconced
there.
I'd like to read (if such a thing exists) a History of Stores. What
happened before lola and
Le Bonheur des Dames?
August
5, 1977
Continuing
War and Peace,
I have a violent emotion, reading the
death of old Prince Bolkonsky, his last words of tenderness to his
daughter ("My darling,
my
friend"), the Princess's scruples about not
disturbing him the night before, whereas he was calling her; Marie's
feeling of guilt because she wanted her father to die for a moment,
anticipating that she would thereby gain her freedom. A nd all this, so
much tenderness, so much poignance, in the midst of the crudest
scuffles, the arrival of the French, the necessity of leaving, etc.
Literature has an effect of truth much more violent for me than
that of religion. By which I mean, quite simply, that literature is
like
religion. And yet, in this week's
Quinzaine,
Lacassin declares peremp–
torily: "Literature no longer exists except in textbooks." Whereby I am
dismissed, in the name of .
..
comic strips.
August
13, 1977
This morning, around eight, the weather was splendid. I had an
