When I Was Old Read Online Free PDF Page B

a certain uneasiness about leaving the house.
    I’ve spent my life travelling, moving, changing my ambience, my habits (except the ones that are connected with my work). But now I hesitate to leave my shell. It was the same way in Lakeville, in Carmel, in Tucson, in Florida.
    I make my nest. I settle down with my family and I hate to leave until one day, without knowing why, I don’t feel at home any more and I take my little world elsewhere to start all over again.
    I wonder if when I take off that way it isn’t because of people, neighbours, intimates, all those whom you are forced to become acquainted with when you live somewhere. You spend a certain amount of time meeting them. When I know them all, when I can no longer step outside without being spoken to, I leave.
    Is that the real reason? Are there others? The fact that
reality doesn’t last long, for example? I mean the time during which one regards as real, as important, as personal, certain walls, certain furniture, the colour of the curtains, the road to town …
    There must be something to that, because each time I move I get rid of my furniture and most of the objects so as to start again almost new, from scratch.
    To start one’s life over each time from scratch!
    That’s almost the same miracle that each child brings us: reliving the first years with him.
    There, perhaps (Pierre is thirteen months old), lies the explanation I seek at random.
    People who come steal a moment of life from me, leave a hole.
Wednesday, 20 July 1960
    I’ve thought for a long time, in fact since I began to observe people, that I learn more about them when I talk than when I listen. If they speak, they generally repeat dicta which are always the same and which reflect the truth as they wish it were. When I speak to them, when I try out different ideas on them, their reactions are much more revealing.
    I just took this notebook to write that single paragraph, which had been more pithy when I first thought of it and which I wished to turn better. Now, there is sun in my study this morning, for the first time in ten days. This delights me. I am also delighted by rain, and
I delight in a spring that is unlike any I have known since 1940.
    I could swear that for the two months of the invasion it didn’t rain once. As I wrote in my last novel, it was the kind of spring one remembers from childhood. May and June of that year were tragic. The invasion, the defeat, the retreat, fear, and, no doubt, also a certain shame (why?), refugees on the roads, air raids, the uncertainty of tomorrow. Now, what remains the most vivid in my memory is the sun, the colour of the sky and the sea at La Rochelle, the smell of spring and of the terraces. I could swear, too, that I’m not the only one, that for thousands of soldiers and of refugees the tragic has been obliterated, leaving only this impression of radiant life.
    For example, lying in a field to escape strafing from a plane which passed so low that my eyes met those of the pilot (he didn’t fire), I discovered some wild plants that I had not seen during years of life in the country, plants that I used to see as a child when I went to play on the parade ground at Liège or on the bank of the canal, plantain for example, others I don’t know the name of which grew beside the railroad tracks, beside rivers and roads.
    For three months I have wanted to write a novel about this period, about a refugee from Jeaumont separated from his daughter and his pregnant wife by the bombardment of a train (it is cut in half, each half going its own way afterwards). Not concerning himself with his family but with a warm female lying near him
in a cattle car. He is having an unexpected holiday, in fact.
    One might say that the collective is quickly forgotten to allow only the individual to survive. Which explains why history is necessarily false.
    My son Pierre, at thirteen months, amazes me by his capacity for wonder. This would seem to confirm my theory of