The Difficulty of Being by Jean Cocteau

divined.
    About seven o’clock, at the height of my attack, I tried to distract myself from it and to get on with my harvest. The machinery had ceased to run and actually made fun of me, forcing me to imitate it in a feeble sort of way. I kept quiet and went no further.
    Rereading these poems, I am astonished at their complete break with
La Crucifixion
. Verses of a somewhat pedantic nature, because what I am after or think I am after, or whatis being dictated to me in large handwriting, is a penance for having allowed myself to be too much seduced by the cinematograph and other frivolous pastimes.
    I am never tired of examining that phenomenon in which we appear to be so free and are, if the truth were told, without a shadow of freedom. All the same this shadow exists. It half conceals our work from us. It keeps an eye on us. It holds us balanced between itself and the light, and the word penumbra would suit it better. While I am examining it (or examining myself) I suffer. I have been wrought by this suffering for seven months, as a piece of gold is wrought by a goldsmith. It must surely be putting its tongue out over the task. It did me a good turn. I stirred, therefore I slept. A man of my nature does not bestir himself thus unless he is dreaming. Theatre, drawings, films all were to me pretexts for this constant movement in which one’s spirit whirls around, leaving no deposit. I shook my bottle. That is enough to sour the wine.
    Suffering has put the brake on me. Despite any efforts to overcome it with fatigue and the giddy round, the day always comes when it orders us to be quiet and keep still. In hospital my eyes were not yet open to this. My poems about the snow, this book about myself, these ink-stained pages, this room of study, instead of the emptiness to which I should have confined myself (medical advice being: think of nothing), are like a good form of silence. That is how I choose to interpret them. This is the only form of ‘think of nothing’ that I can manage. With this mist and these Alps before me I panic at the thought of having risked another. That prescribed by the doctors.

ON DEATH
    I HAVE PASSED THROUGH TIMES SO INTOLERABLE that death has seemed to me a delicious thing. So I have formed the habit of not fearing her * and of looking her straight in the face.
    Paul Eluard astonished me when he told me he was frightened to see me defying death in the part of the
Baron Fantôme
, in which I dissolve into dust. To live disconcerts me more than to die. I did not see Garros dead nor Jean Le Roy, nor Raymond Radiguet nor Jean Desbordes. My mother, Jean de Polignac, Jean Giraudoux, Edouard Bourdet, are the dead with whom I have lately been connected. Except for Jean de Polignac I made drawings of them all, and was left alone in their rooms for a long time. I looked at them very closely in order to follow their lines. I touched them, I admired them. For death takes trouble with her statues. She smooths away their wrinkles. However much I said to myself that they were not concerned with what concerns me, that sickening distances separated them from me, I felt that we were quite close, like the two sides of a coin which cannot know each other, but are only separated from each other by the thickness of the metal.
    If I were not sad at forsaking the people I love and who can still hope for something from me, I would wait with curiosity for the shadow, worn at the onset of death, to touch and foreshorten me. I should not enjoy the
coup de grâce
and the lengthy business leading up to the point where she has merely to finish us off. I should like to bid farewell to my nearest and dearest and to see my work rejoice to take my place.
    Nothing about death disgusts me except the pomp with which it is accompanied. Funerals disturb my memories. At Jean Giraudoux’s I said to Lestringuez: ‘Let’s go. He never turned up.’ I imagined him playing at some pin-table in a cellar of the Palais-Royal.
    Bourdet’s was