“I do.”
“Well, a fool is a Joachim Murat reviewing his officers. He sees one from Martinique covered with medals. ‘Vous êtes nègre?’ Murat asks. ‘Oui, mon général!’ the man answers. And Murat says: ‘Bravo, bravo, continuez!’ And so on. You follow me? Forgive me, but tonight I’m celebrating a historic decision in my life. I’ve stopped drinking. Another round? Don’t answer, you’ll make me feel guilty. Pilade!”
“What about the morons?”
“Ah. Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens of Piraeus are Athenians.”
“Which they are.”
“Yes, but only accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason.”
“You mean it’s okay to say something that’s wrong as long as the reason is right.”
“Of course. Why else go to the trouble of being a rational animal?”
“All great apes evolved from lower life forms, man evolved from lower life forms, therefore man is a great ape.”
“Not bad. In such statements you suspect that something’s wrong, but it takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky. You can spot the fool right away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism. For an editor, it’s bad news. It can take him an eternity to identify a moron. Plenty of morons’ books are published, because they’re convincing at first glance. An editor is not required to weed out the morons. If the Academy of Sciences doesn’t do it, why should he?”
“Philosophers don’t either. Saint Anselm’s ontological argument is moronic, for example. God must exist because I can conceive Him as a being perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses existence in thought with existence in reality.”
“True, but Gaunilon’s refutation is moronic, too. I can think of an island in the sea even if the island doesn’t exist. He confuses thinking of the possible with thinking of the necessary.”
“A duel between morons.”
“Exactly. And God loves every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable only to prove that Anselm and Gaunilon were morons. What a sublime purpose for creation, or, rather, for that act by which God willed Himself to be: to unmask cosmic moronism.”
“We’re surrounded by morons.”
“Everyone’s a moron—save me and thee. Or, rather—I wouldn’t want to offend—save thee.”
“Somehow I feel that Godel’s theorem has something to do with all this.”
“I wouldn’t know, I’m a cretin. Pilade!”
“My round.”
“We’ll split it. Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans are liars. It must be true, because he’s a Cretan himself and knows his countrymen well.”
“That’s moronic thinking.”
“Saint Paul. Epistle to Titus. On the other hand, those who call Epimenides a liar have to think all Cretans aren’t, but Cretans don’t trust Cretans, therefore no Cretan calls Epimenides a liar.”
“Isn’t that moronic thinking?”
“You decide. I told you, they are hard to identify. Morons can even win the Nobel Prize.”
“Hold on. Of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are not fundamentalists, but of those who do believe God created the world in seven days, some are. Therefore, of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are fundamentalists. How’s that?”
“My God—to use the mot juste—I wouldn’t know. A moronism or not?”
“It is, definitely, even if it were true. Violates one of the laws of syllogisms: universal conclusions cannot be drawn from two particulars.”
“And what if you were a moron?”
“I’d be in excellent, venerable company.”
“You’re right. And perhaps, in a logical system different from ours, our moronism is wisdom. The whole history of logic consists of attempts to define an acceptable notion of moronism. A task too immense. Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.”
“Thought as the coherent expression of moronism.”
“But what is moronism to one is incoherence to another.”
“Profound. It’s two o’clock, Pilade’s about to close, and we still haven’t got to the lunatics.”
“Pm getting there. A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”
“Invariably?”
“There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden…” He was about to order another whiskey, but changed his mind and asked for the check. “Speaking of the Templars, the other day some character left me a manuscript on the subject. A lunatic, but with a human face. The book starts reasonably enough. Would you like to see it?”
“I’d be glad to. Maybe there’s something I can use.”
“I doubt that very much. But drop in if you have a spare half hour. Number i, Via Sincero Renato. The visit will be of more benefit to me than to you. You can tell me whether the book has any merit.”
“What makes you trust me?”
“Who says I trust you? But if you come, I’ll trust you. I trust curiosity.”
A student rushed in, face twisted in anger. “Comrades! There are fascists along the canal with chains!”
“Let’s get them,” said the fellow with the Tartar mustache who had threatened me over Krupskaya. “Come on, comrades!” And they all left.
“What do you want to do?” I asked, feeling guilty. “Should we go along?”
“No,” Belbo said. “Pilade sets these things up to clear the place out. For my first night on the wagon, I feel pretty high. Must be the cold-turkey effect. Everything I’ve said to you so far is false. Good night, Casaubon.”
His sterility was infinite. It was part of the ecstasy.
—E. M. Cioran, Le mauvais demiurge, Paris, Gallimard, 1969, “Pensées étranglées”
The conversation at Pilade’s had shown me the public Belbo. But a keen observer would have been able to sense the melancholy behind the sarcasm. Not that Belbo’s sarcasm was the mask. The mask, perhaps, was the private confessing he did. Or perhaps his melancholy itself was the mask, a contrivance to hide a deeper melancholy.
There is a document in which he tried to fictionalize what he told me about his job when I went to Garamond the next day. It contains all his precision and passion, the disappointment of an editor who could write only through others while yearning for creativity of his own. It also has the moral severity that led him to punish himself for desiring something to which he did not feel entitled. Though he painted his desire in pathetic and garish hues, I never knew a man who could pity himself with such contempt.
FILENAME: Seven Seas Jim
Tomorrow, see young Cinti.
1. Good monograph, scholarly, perhaps a bit too scholarly.
2. In the conclusion, the comparison between Catullus, the poetae novi, and today’s avant-garde is the best part.
3. Why not make this the introduction?
4. Convince him. He’ll say that such flights of fancy don’t belong in a philological series. He’s afraid of alienating his professor, who is supposed to write the authoritative preface. A brilliant idea in the last two pages might go unnoticed, but at the beginning it would be too conspicuous, it would irritate the academic powers that be.
5. If, however, it is put into italics, in a conversational form, separate from the actual scholarship, then the hypothesis remains only a hypothesis and doesn’t undermine the seriousness of the work. And readers will be captivated at once; they’ll approach the book in a totally different way.
Am I urging him to an act of freedom—or am I using him to write my own book?
Transforming books with a word here, a word there. Demiurge for the work of others. Tapping at the hardened clay, at the statue someone else has already carved. Instead of taking soft clay and molding my own. Give Moses the right tap with the hammer, and he’ll talk.
See William S.
“I’ve looked at your work. Not bad. It has tension, imagination. Is this the first piece you’ve written?”
“No. I wrote another tragedy. It’s the story of two lovers in Verona who—”
“Let’s talk about this piece first, Mr. S. I was wondering why you set it in France. May I suggest—Denmark? It wouldn’t require much work. If you just change two or three names, and turn the château of Châlons-sur-Marne into, say, the castle of Elsinore … In a Nordic, Protestant atmosphere, in the shadow of Kierkegaard, so to speak, all these existential overtones…”
“Perhaps you’re right.”
“I think I am. The work might need a little touching up stylistically. Nothing drastic; the barber’s snips before he holds up the mirror for you, so to speak. The father’s ghost, for example. Why at the end? I’d put him at the beginning. That way the father’s warning helps motivate the young prince’s behavior, and it establishes the conflict with the mother.”
“Hmm, good idea. I’d only have to move one scene.”
“Exactly. Now, style. This passage
