Page 116 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
and if the culprit has a hard heart (for it is not enough to have committed a crime; one must deserve it and deserve having committed it), he raises it upon a pedestal of solitude. Solitude is not given to me; I earn it. I am led to it by a concern for beauty. I want to define myself in it, delimit my contours, emerge from confusion, set myself in order.
My being a foundling earned me a lonely youth and childhood. Being a thief led me to believe in the singularity of thievery. I told myself that I was a monstrous exception. In fact, my taste and my activity as a thief were related to my homosexuality, emerged from what had already set me apart in an exceptional solitude. I was utterly astounded when I saw how prevalent theft was. I was deep in the very heart of banality. To emerge from it, I had only to glorify myself with my thief's destiny and to will it. This once provoked a flash of wit which amused some fools. Was I called a bad thief? As if it mattered! The word thief determines the man whose chief activity is theft. Specifies him by eliminating—while he is so named—−everything else he is other than thief. Simplifies him. The poetry lies in his full awareness of being a thief. It may be that the awareness of any other quality capable of becoming so essential as to name you is likewise poetry. Yet it is well that the awareness of my singularity be named by an asocial activity: theft. No doubt, the culprit who is proud of what he is owes his singularity to society, but he must have already had it for society to recognize it and make him guilty of it. I wanted to oppose society, but it had already condemned me, punishing not so much the actual thief as the indomitable enemy whose lonely spirit it feared. But it contained the singularity which was to fight against it, which was to be a thorn in its flesh, a remorse—an anxiety—a wound from which flowed its blood, which it dared not shed itself. If I can not have the most brilliant destiny, I want the most wretched, not for the purpose of a sterile solitude, but in order to achieve something new with such rare matter.
I ran into Guy one day, not in Montmartre nor on the Champs−Elysees, but at the Saint−Ouen flea−market. He was dirty, ragged, covered with filth. And alone, in a group of purchasers poorer and dirtier than the tradesmen. He was trying to sell a pair of sheets, probably stolen from a hotel room. (I have often burdened myself with things that made my figure and gait look absurd: books under my arm−pits which prevented my arms from moving, sheets or blankets rolled around my waist which made me seem stout, umbrellas against my legs, medals in a sleeve.) He was a sorry sight. Java was with me. We recognized each other at once.
“Is that you, Guy?”
I don't know what he read on my face: his became frightful.
“All right, let me alone.”
“Listen...”
The sheets were draped on his fore−arms, in the noble manner in which dummies display cloth in store windows. With his head bent slightly to the side as if to emphasize his words, he said:
“Forget me.”
“But...”
“Pal, forget me.”
Shame and humiliation must have denied him the saliva for a longer sentence. Java and I continued on our way.
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