When I Was Old Read Online Free PDF Page A

on their sincerity.
    The question bothers me. Others, much younger than I and who have lived less, don’t have such scruples and readily talk about hypocrisy and cynicism.
    Put them in the presence of a human being and they flee him after a short contact.
    Not only have I scruples, but I don’t understand. For I don’t believe in force, physical or moral, nor in cynicism, nor in calculation, at least not in the sense intended by these people of whom I’ve been talking.
    I try to understand and I see that it’s very hard. Financiers? Celebrities from Paris or London? Stars of Europe or California? Fame, money, power, life …
    All this doesn’t exist, doesn’t exist in a state of nature. After all, they are only men, as vulnerable as the rest, if not more so.
    From this point of view I wonder how, why … How do they manage to write what they write, to believe, or seem to believe, in what they would have us believe … ?
    I would like to call them decent men. As decent as the average labourer, as the conventional and often generous white-collar worker.
    However, they react to the Congolese crisis only in terms of their shareholdings in Katanga, or the Cuban crisis in terms of their instinctive revulsion against Communism.
    They falsify everything, the Algerian war and internal politics. Do they really see only what they want to see? Is it a strain for them, and have they moments of doubt, when they know that they shirk the truth?
    Don’t their interests force them into convictions which
seem incompatible with everything they know to be true?
    They meet great doctors, biologists, lawyers who daily deal with men as they really are.
    How can they go on seeing man as he is not, seeing him as he ought to be in the interest of their interests, so that their own image may stay untarnished?
    It’s too easy to see these people as all of a piece. I know they are weak, riddled with complexes, that they are often afraid, ashamed, that they seek reassurance.
    But my intelligence, because once more I must use terms that everybody uses, furnishes me no satisfactory answer.
    For myself, the only possible approach is to write a novel, to become, for the time being, the character, to feel as he feels. I have the impression, perhaps the illusion, that this gives me more of the truth.
    I could have cited other names, other men whom I know as well or as slightly. It happens that these, here, have come in contact with me in one of the rare periods when I haven’t put up a fence around my life as a working novelist, and around our family life.
    The parade has gone on for two weeks. I have a hangover from it. It’s possible that I repeat myself – repeat myself often. Indeed I have always been astounded at the small number of ideas – and can one even call them ideas – that a man collects in fifty-seven years of life. I’m not speaking of ideas one can get from books, of course. I’m speaking of those that have been digested, of what is left, of what has finally become part of ourselves.
    Is there really anything left?
    A certain attitude, perhaps, with me a curiosity which is never satisfied, a desire to understand not explain, to feel the real man beneath men’s appearance.
    I often have the impression that it would only take a little extra effort to discover that I am like them, that they are like me, that it is only habits, attitudes, words in which we differ.
    Even if they upset and infuriate me, I love them, perhaps because I feel they are weak.
    But why the devil do these people censure, and why do others, in turn, censure them?
Tuesday, 19 July 1960
    The last ones have left and I’m a little ashamed of the relief my wife and I feel. For I really like them, these people who came to share a moment in our life. Some of them are friends. I have a deep affection for Sven Nielsen because I believe I understand him. Even the journalists, when they’ve gone, leave me with a pleasant memory.
    Still, it is more and more disagreeable