Place du Châtelet: A stranger, Nana
the unwitting philosopher
- Mind if I look?
- No
- You look bored
- Not at all
- What are you doing?
- I'm reading
- Will you buy me a drink?
- If you like
- Do you come here often?
- Occasionally. I happened by
- Why are you reading?
- It's my job
- It's odd. Suddenly I don't know
what to say; it often happens to me. I know what I want to say. I
think about whether it is what I mean. But when the moment comes to
speak, I can't say it
- Yes, of course. You've read 'The
Three Musketeers'?
- I saw the film. Why?
- Because in it, Porthos, in fact it
is not in 'The Musketeers', this is really in 'Twenty Years Later',
Porthos, tall, strong, a little stupid, he's never thought in his
life. He has to place a bomb in a cellar to blow it up. He does it.
He places the bomb, lights the fuse, then he runs away, of course.
But suddenly he begins to think. What about? How it is possible to
put one foot before the other? You must have thought about that,
too. So he stops running. He can't go on, he can't move forward. The
bomb explodes, the cellar falls on him. He holds it up with his
shoulders. But after a day, or maybe two, he is crushed to death.
The first time he thought, it killed him
- Why did you tell me that story?
- No reason, just to talk.
- Why must
one always talk? Often one shouldn't talk, but live in silence. The
more one talks, the less the words mean
- Perhaps, but can one?
- I don't know
- I've found that we can't live
without talking
- I'd like to live without talking
- Yes, it would be nice, wouldn't
it? Like loving one another more. But it isn't possible
- But why? Words should express just
what one wants to say. Do they betray us?
- But we betray them, too. One
should be able to express oneself. It has been done in writing.
Think: someone like Plato can still be understood - he can. Yet he
wrote in Greek, 2.500 years ago. No one really knows the language,
at least, not exactly. Yet something gets through, so we should be
able to express ourselves. And we must
- Why must we? To understand each
other?
- We must think, and for thought we
need words. There's no other way to think. To communicate, one must
talk; that is our life
- Yes, but it is very difficult. I
think life should be easy. Your talk of The Three Musketeers may
make a good story but it's terrible
- Yes, but it's a pointer. I believe
one learns to talk well only when one has renounced life for a time.
That's the price
- So, to speak is fatal?
- Speaking is almost a resurrection
in relation to life. Speech is another life from when one does not
speak. So, to live in speech one must pass through the death of life
without speech. I may not be putting it clearly, but there is a kind
of ascetic rule that stops one from talking well until one sees life
with detachment.
- But one can't live everyday life
with... I don't know
- With detachment. We balance,
that's why we pass from silence to words. We swing between the two
because it's the movement of life. From everyday life one rises to a
life we call superior, the thinking life. But this life presupposes
one has killed the everyday, too elementary life
- Then thinking and talking are the
same thing?
- So I believe. Plato said so; it's
an old idea. One cannot distinguish the thought from the words that
express it. An instant of thought can only be grasped through words.
- So one must talk and risk lying?
- Lies, too, are part of our quest.
Errors and lies are very similar. I don't mean ordinary lies, like I
promise to come tomorrow, but I don't, as I didn't want to. You see,
those are ploys. But a subtle lie is little different from an error.
One searches and can't find the right word. That's why you didn't
know what to say. You were afraid of not finding the right word.
That's the explanation
- How can one be sure of having
found the right word?
- One must work. It needs an effort.
One must speak in a way that is right, doesn't hurt, says what has
to be said, does what has to be done without hurting or bruising.
- One must try to be in good faith.
Someone told me: "There is truth in everything, even in error."
- That's true. France didn't see it
in the seventeenth century. They thought one could avoid error and
what's more, that one could live directly in the truth. It isn't
possible Hence Kant, Hegel, German philosophy: to bring us back to
life and make us see that we must pass through error to arrive at
the truth
- What do you think about love?
- The body had to come into it.
Leibnitz introduced the contingent. Contingent truths and necessary
truths make up life. German philosophy showed us that in life, one
thinks with the servitudes and errors of life. One must manage with
that, that's true
- Shouldn't love be the only truth?
- For that, love would always have
to be true. Do you know anyone who knows at once what he loves? No.
When you're twenty you don't know. All you know are bits and pieces,
you make arbitrary choices. Your "I love" is an impure
affair. But to be completely at one with what you love, you need
maturity. That means searching. This is the truth of life. That's
why love is a solution, on condition that it is true.
- my life to live / vivre sa vie (1962)
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