“night watches”: “The wakefulness of your geminate soul/is the sleep which I, mere body, deny myself.” Whilst everything he wrote remained extremely obscure, it nevertheless had a certain verve. I read very little of what he was writing and he was still engaged on translating Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
.
One morning – by then we’d known each other for about ten or eleven years – we were once again sitting on the covered terrace of a café in St-Germain. He’d acquired a certain nobility of appearance and had discovered a way of combing his thinning hair, which did not look thin so much as lighter in colour. He seemed in good spirits after the misfortunes of recent years and he told me about the enormous progress he’d made in his writing. He had, he said, borrowing my ironic tone, completed eighty-three point five per cent of his entire body of work. Then he put on his confidential face and grew more serious: he had only two texts to complete now, a novel to be entitled
Saturn
and the long-postponed essay on pain. Given the novel’s technical complexities, he would leave that to last and he now felt strong enough to return to his experiment and again stop taking his medication. He thought that, this time, he’d be able to lastout long enough and be able to start writing as soon as he’d learned whatever it was he needed to learn. “Over the past few years working in my profession I’ve seen a lot of pain, I’ve even controlled it; I’ve both fought it and permitted it, according to what was in the patient’s best interests; I’ve suppressed it completely with morphine, as well as with other medications and drugs that can’t be found on the open market and to which only doctors have access. Many are as closely guarded as state secrets; what you can buy in pharmacies and dispensaries is only a tiny fraction of what’s available, but there’s a black market in everything. I’ve seen pain now, I’ve observed it, gauged it, measured it, but now it’s my turn to suffer it again, and not only physical pain, which is commonplace enough, but psychic pain, the pain that makes the thinking brain want only to stop thinking, but it can’t. I’m convinced that consciousness is the source of man’s greatest suffering and there’s no cure for it, no way to blunt it, the only end is death, though even that you can’t be sure of.” This time I didn’t try to dissuade him, not even in the oblique, jokey way I had when he first announced his intention of embarking on this personal research. We had too much respect for each other and so I just said: “Well, keep me posted.”
I can’t honestly say that he did, in that he didn’t keep me informed of his progress or of his thoughts on the subject, perhaps because he could only talk about it indirectly, by describing feelings and symptoms and states of mind, which he didn’t in the least mind discussing and so, in the letters I received in subsequent months – I was commuting between Madrid and Italy at the time – he never said much about what was happening to him or what he was thinking, his letters were even more laconic than usual, but he did sometimes let slip the occasional disquieting remark – explicit or enigmatic, confessional or cryptic, dependingon the context. I’ve just today been re-reading some remarks of his that fall into the second category, remarks that usually came at the end of his letters, just before he signed off or even after that, in a postscript: “Pain thought pleasure and future are the four numbers necessary for and sufficient to my interest.” “Nothing sullies one more than an excess of modesty: pay up rather than be your own Shylock.” “Let’s just do our best not to fall off the back of the train.” “If you don’t desert the desert, the desert will desert you, not in the sense that it will leave you, but in the sense that it will make a desert of you.” “Best wishes and don’t let anyone have it
Anatomy of Melancholy
.
One morning – by then we’d known each other for about ten or eleven years – we were once again sitting on the covered terrace of a café in St-Germain. He’d acquired a certain nobility of appearance and had discovered a way of combing his thinning hair, which did not look thin so much as lighter in colour. He seemed in good spirits after the misfortunes of recent years and he told me about the enormous progress he’d made in his writing. He had, he said, borrowing my ironic tone, completed eighty-three point five per cent of his entire body of work. Then he put on his confidential face and grew more serious: he had only two texts to complete now, a novel to be entitled
Saturn
and the long-postponed essay on pain. Given the novel’s technical complexities, he would leave that to last and he now felt strong enough to return to his experiment and again stop taking his medication. He thought that, this time, he’d be able to lastout long enough and be able to start writing as soon as he’d learned whatever it was he needed to learn. “Over the past few years working in my profession I’ve seen a lot of pain, I’ve even controlled it; I’ve both fought it and permitted it, according to what was in the patient’s best interests; I’ve suppressed it completely with morphine, as well as with other medications and drugs that can’t be found on the open market and to which only doctors have access. Many are as closely guarded as state secrets; what you can buy in pharmacies and dispensaries is only a tiny fraction of what’s available, but there’s a black market in everything. I’ve seen pain now, I’ve observed it, gauged it, measured it, but now it’s my turn to suffer it again, and not only physical pain, which is commonplace enough, but psychic pain, the pain that makes the thinking brain want only to stop thinking, but it can’t. I’m convinced that consciousness is the source of man’s greatest suffering and there’s no cure for it, no way to blunt it, the only end is death, though even that you can’t be sure of.” This time I didn’t try to dissuade him, not even in the oblique, jokey way I had when he first announced his intention of embarking on this personal research. We had too much respect for each other and so I just said: “Well, keep me posted.”
I can’t honestly say that he did, in that he didn’t keep me informed of his progress or of his thoughts on the subject, perhaps because he could only talk about it indirectly, by describing feelings and symptoms and states of mind, which he didn’t in the least mind discussing and so, in the letters I received in subsequent months – I was commuting between Madrid and Italy at the time – he never said much about what was happening to him or what he was thinking, his letters were even more laconic than usual, but he did sometimes let slip the occasional disquieting remark – explicit or enigmatic, confessional or cryptic, dependingon the context. I’ve just today been re-reading some remarks of his that fall into the second category, remarks that usually came at the end of his letters, just before he signed off or even after that, in a postscript: “Pain thought pleasure and future are the four numbers necessary for and sufficient to my interest.” “Nothing sullies one more than an excess of modesty: pay up rather than be your own Shylock.” “Let’s just do our best not to fall off the back of the train.” “If you don’t desert the desert, the desert will desert you, not in the sense that it will leave you, but in the sense that it will make a desert of you.” “Best wishes and don’t let anyone have it
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