Page 119 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
of surfaces. It is to these sparkles that I am comparing the new quality— virtue—achieved by inertia, cowardice, etc.
1. Sheaf: faisceaux; fascinated: fascine (Translator's note).
This virtue has no name, unless it be that of the one from whom it emanates. Having found an inflammable substance, these fires which issue from him set me ablaze. This is the meaning of love. Having applied myself to the quest of what I compare within me to this substance, I achieve, by reflection, the absence of such qualities. Encountering them in Java dazzles me. He sparkles. I burn, for he burns me. As I hold up my pen for a brief meditation, the words which crowd into my mind suggest light and heat, by means of which we usually speak of love: dazzlement, rays, fire, beams, fascination, burning. However, Java's qualities—those which
1
make up his fires—are icy. Each of them separately suggests an absence of temperament, of temperature.
1. Java's dream. Upon entering my room—for if he sleeps with his girl he comes to see me during the day—Java related his dream. But first, that the night before he had met a sailor in the subway.
“It's the first time I've ever turned around to look at a handsome guy,” he said.
“Didn't you try to grope him?”
“You're crazy. But I got into his train. If he'd suggested it, I think I'd have made love with him.”
Then he complacently described the sailor. Finally he related the dream he had had the night following this encounter. In the dream, he was a cabin−boy on a sailing−ship. Another sailor was pursuing him with a knife and finally caught him aloft, in the ropes. Java then fell on his knees before the raised knife and said, “I'll count to three. If you're not a coward, kill me.”
Hardly had be uttered the last word, when the entire scene vanished. “Afterwards,” he said, “I saw an ass.”
“And then?”
“I woke up.”
What I have just written does not, I know, render Java but gives the idea of a moment which he was in my presence. It is now, as he is abandoning me, that I explain, by means of an image, why I suffer. We have just had a brutal split which has been very painful to me. Java avoids me. His silence, his rapid kisses, his rapid visits—he conies on a bicycle— are a flight. Beneath the chestnut trees on the Champs−Elysees I told him how passionately I loved him. I have a good chance. What attaches me to him just when he is about to leave is his emotion, his bewilderment in the face of my resolution, the brutality of this sudden break. He is overwhelmed. What I tell him—about us, and chiefly about him—makes both of us such poignant creatures that his eyes grow dim. He is sad. He grieves in silence and this grief haloes him with a poetry which makes him more attractive, for he is now gleaming in the mist. I grow more attached to him when I have to leave him.
The Thief's Journal 117