Page 51 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
To speak of my work as a writer would be a pleonasm. The boredom of my prison days made me take refuge in my past life, whether vagrant, austere or destitute. Later on, when I was free, I wrote again, in order to earn money. The idea of a literary opus would make me shrug my shoulders. However, if I examine what I have written, I perceive there, patiently pursued, a will” to rehabilitate persons, objects and feelings reputedly vile. Naming them with words that are usually reserved for what is noble was perhaps childish and somewhat facile; I was in too much of a hurry. I used the handiest means, but I would not have done so were it not that, within me, these objects, these feelings (treason, theft, cowardice, fear) called for the qualifier generally reserved—by you—for their opposites. Perhaps at the moment, in the heat of writing, I wanted to magnify the feelings, attitudes or objects that were honored by some splendid boy before whose beauty I bowed low; but today, as I reread what I have written, I have forgotten these boys: all that remains of them is the attribute which I have sung, and that is what will glow in my books with a brilliance equal to pride, heroism and boldness. I was not trying to make excuses for them. Nor to justify them. I wanted them to have the right to the honors of the Name. This operation will prove not to have been fruitless for me. I already feel its efficacity. In embellishing what you hold in contempt, my mind, weary of the game that consists in naming with a glamorous name that which stirred my heart, refuses any qualification. Without confusing them, it accepts them all, beings and things, in their equal, nakedness. It then refuses to clothe them. Hence, I no longer want to write; I am dead to Letters. However, I gather from the newspapers of the past few days that the world is apprehensive. People are talking about war again. As anxiety mounts, as preparations begin to take shape (no longer the high−sounding declarations of statesmen but the menacing exactness of the technicians), a strange peace comes over me. I turn inward. There I arrange for myself a fierce and delightful place from which I shall regard men's fury without fearing it. I long for the noise of cannon, for the trumpets of death, so that I may arrange an endlessly recreated bubble of silence. I shall remove them from me even further by the multiple and ever thicker layers of my past adventures, chewed over and over, slobbered all over me, spun out and wrapped about like the silk of a cocoon. I shall work at conceiving my solitude and immortality at living them, unless an idiotic desire for sacrifice makes me emerge from them.
My solitude in prison was total. Now that I talk of it it is less so. Then I was alone. At night I would let myself be borne along by a current of abandon. The world was a torrent, a rapid of forces come together to carry me to the sea, to death. I had the bitter joy of knowing I was alone. I am nostalgic for the following sound: as I lie dreaming in my cell, my mind idly drifting, suddenly a convict in the cell above gets up and starts walking to and fro, to and fro. My reverie is also adrift, but this sound (on the first level, so to speak, because of its precision) reminds me that the body dreaming it, the one from which it has escaped, is in prison, prisoner of a clear, sudden, regular pacing. I would like to have my old comrades−in−misery, the children of sorrow. I envy the glory which they secrete and which I utilize for ends less pure. Talent is courteousness in regard to matter; it consists in giving song to that which was dumb. My talent will be the love I bear to that which makes up the world of prisons and penal colonies. Not that I want to transform them or bring them round to your kind of life, or that I look upon them with indulgence or pity: I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty—a sunken beauty—which I deny you. Soclay, Pilorge, Weidmann, Serge de Lenz, Gentlemen of the Police, crafty informers, at times you seem to me adorned, as if dressed in widows' weeds, with such lovely crimes that I envy the first for the mythologic fear they inspire, the others for their tortures, and all for the infamy in which they finally merge. If I cast a backward look, I see only a succession of pitiful actions. My books tell about them. They have adorned them with qualifications thanks to which I recall them with gladness. I have thus been that little wretch who knew only hunger, physical humiliation, poverty, fear and degradation. From such galling attitudes as these I have drawn reasons for glory.
“That's probably what I am,” I would say to myself, “but at least I'm aware of it, and such awareness destroys shame and affords me a feeling that few know: pride. You who regard me with contempt are made up of nothing else but a succession of similar miseries, but you will never be aware of this and thus will never know the meaning of pride, in other words, the knowledge of a force that enables you to stand up to misery— not your own misery, but that of which mankind is composed.”
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