And its adjective, like that of the idea which it gave me, is, as it should be, “fantastic,” and its noun, after my solitary night of peril, the word “with.”
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So your idea of writing an essay about a successful day was itself a successful day?
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That was before the summer. Over the garden the swallows were flying “so high!” I shared a young woman's pleasure in smoothing out the curved brim of a straw hat; the Pentecost fête was lively in the night wind of our village, the cherry tree stood fruit-red beside the railroad tracks, the workaday garden came to be called the Garden of the Step Takenâand now it was winter, as, for example, it revealed itself on the railroad curve repeated yesterday for my reassurance as I could see by the handrail and the gray flowering of the clumps of wild grapes against the misty network of the Eiffel Tower, the snowberries whishing past the distant towers of La Defense, the acacia thorn jerking past the barely discernible hazy whiteness of the domes of Sacré-Coeur.
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Once again: In the light of all this, was that a successful day?
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No answer.
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I think no, thanks to my imagination, I know it was. How much more could be done with that day, with nothing but that day. And now its momentum is in my life,
in your life, in our epoch. (“We lost our momentum,” said the captain of a baseball team, which had been about to win the game.) The day is in my power, for my time. If I don't give the day a try now, then I've missed my chance of enduring; more and more often, I realize, all the while growing angrier at myself, how as time goes on more and more moments speak to me and how I understand, and above all appreciate, less and less of what they say. I must repeat, I am furious with myself, over my inability to maintain the morning light on the horizon, which just now made me look up and come to rest (
into
rest, we read in the Pauline epistle), so that, when I start reading, the blue of the heather still occupies the middle ground, a few pages farther on it is a vague spot in the Nowhere, and by the onset of dusk the motionless form of the blackbird in the bush is still “the outline of Evening Island after a day on the open sea,” and a tick of the watch later is nothing moreâmeaningless, forgotten, betrayed. Yes, that's how it is: more and more as the years go byâthe richer the moments seem to me, the louder they denounce me to high heavenâI see myself as a traitor to my day, day after day, forgetful of the day, forgetful of the world. Again and again I resolve to remain faithful to the day, with the help, led “by the hand” (“maintenant,” hand-holding, that's your word for “now”) of those moments. I would like to hold them, think about them, preserve them, and day after day, no sooner have I turned away from them than they literally “fall” from my hands, as though to punish me for my infidelity, for, it can't be denied, I had turned away from them. Fewer
and fewer of the increasingly frequent significant moments of the day ripe, yes, that's the word,
ripen
anything for me. The moment of the children's voices this morning in the lane ripened nothing; now in the afternoon, with clouds drifting eastward, it produces no aftereffectâthough at the time they seemed to rejuvenate the wintry forest ⦠Should that be taken to mean that the time for my essay on the successful day is past? Have I let the moment slip by? Should I have gotten up earlier? And rather than an essay, mightn't the psalm formâa supplication presumed in advance to be in vainâhave been more conducive to the idea of such a day? Day, let everything in you ripen something for me. Ripen the ticking of the lanceolate willow leaves as they fall through the air, the left-handed ticket agent deep in his book, who once again makes me wait for my ticket, the sun on the door handle. Ripen me. I've become my own enemy, I destroy the light of my day, destroy my love, destroy my book. The more often individual moments resound as pure vowelsâ“vowel” is another word for such a momentâthe more seldom I find the consonant to go with it, to carry me through the day. The glow at the end of the sandy path to the nameless pond: Ah! but a moment later it has faded, as though it had never been. Divine Being, or “Thou, the more-than-I” that once spoke through the Prophets and later on “through the Son,” dost thou also speak in the present, purely through the day? And why am I unable to hold, grasp, pass on what thus speaks through the day, and, I believe, or rather, thanks to my imagination, know, starts speaking anew at
every moment? “He who is and who was and who will be”: why can what once was said of “the god” not be said of my present day?
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On a successful dayâattempt at a chronicle of this day âglobules of dew on a raven feather. As usual, the old woman, though perhaps not the same one as yesterday, stood around in the newspaper shop long after completing her purchase, and spoke her mind. The ladder in the gardenâembodiment of his need to get out of himself âhad seven rungs. The sand in the trucks moving through the village was the same color as the façade of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. The chin of a young girl in the library touched her neck. A tin bucket took its shape. A mailbox turned yellow. The market woman wrote the bill on the palm of her hand. On a successful day it happens that a cigarette butt rolls in the gutter, that a cup smokes on a tree stump, and that a row of seats within the dark church is bright in the sunshine. It happens that the few men in the café, even the loudmouth, keep silent together for a long moment, and that the stranger to the village keeps silent with them. It happens that my sharpened hearing for my work also opens me up to the sounds in the house. It happens that one of your eyes is smaller than the other, that the blackbird hops under the bush, and that when the lower branches rise I think “updraft.” Finally, it even happens that nothing happens. On the successful day, a habit will be discontinued, an opinion vanish, and I shall be surprised by him, by you, by myself. And along with “with,” a second word
form will dominate; namely, “and.” In the house I shall discover a corner that has hitherto been overlooked, where “someone could live!” As I turn into a side street, “Where am I? I've never been here before” will be a sensational moment; when I see the light-dark space in a hedge, the “New-World explorer” feeling will set in, and when I walk a little farther than usual and look back, a cry of “I never saw that before” will escape me. Your repose, as sometimes happens in children, will also be amazement. On the successful day, I shall simply have been its medium, simply have gone along with the day, let the sun shine on me, the wind blow on me, the rain rain on me, my verb will have been “let.” In the course of the day, your inwardness will become as varied as the outside world, and by the end of the day you will have translated Odysseus' epithet, “the much-buffeted,” to yourself as “the many-sided,” and that many-sidedness will have made you dance inwardly. On a successful day, the hero would have been able to “laugh” at his mishaps (or would at least have started to laugh at the third mishap). He would have been in the company of formsâif only of the various leaves on the ground. His I-day would have opened out into a world-day. Every place would have acquired its moment, and he would have been able to say: “This is it.” He would have arrived at an understanding with mortality. (“Never has death spoiled the sport of the day.”) His epithet for everything would have been an unchanging “In view of”: In view of you, in view of a rose, in view of the asphalt, and matter, or “corporeity”?, would have cried out to him, time and again for creation. He
would have put on a show of good cheer and cheerfully done nothing, and from time to time a weight on his back would have kept him warm. For a moment, for a “casting of the eye,” the time of a word, he would suddenly have become you. And at the end of the day he would have called out for a bookâsomething more than a mere chronicle: “The fairy tale of the successful day.” And at the very end, he would have gloriously forgotten that the day was supposed to be successful â¦
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Have you ever experienced a successful day? Everyone I know has experienced one; most people have actually had many. One was satisfied if the day hadn't been too long. Another said something like: “Standing on the bridge, with the sky over me. In the morning, laughed with the children. Just looking, nothing special. There's happiness in looking.” And in the opinion of a third, simply the village street through which he had just passedâwith the raindrops dripping from the enormous key of the locksmith's sign, with the bamboo shoots cooking in somebody's front garden, with the three bowls on a kitchen windowsill containing tangerines, grapes, and peeled potatoes, with the taxi parked as usual outside the driver's houseâwas in itself a “successful day.” The priest, whose pet word was “longing,” considered a day when he heard a friendly voice successful. And hadn't he himself, who longed time and again for an hour in which nothing had happened, except that a bird turned about on a branch, that a white ball lay at the bottom of a bush, and that schoolchildren were sunning themselves on the station
platform, thought in spite of himself: Has this been the whole day? And often in the evening, when he called the events of the past day to mindâyes, it was a kind of “calling”âdidn't the things or places of a mere moment occur to him as names for it. “That was the day when the man with the baby carriage went zigzagging through the piles of leaves.” “That was the day when the gardener's banknotes were mixed with grass and leaves.” “That was the day when the café was empty when the refrigerator rumbled and the light went out ⦔ So why not content ourselves with a single successful hour? Why not simply call the moment a day?
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Ungaretti's poem “I illuminate myself with the immeasurable” is entitled “Morning.” Couldn't those two lines just as well be about the “afternoon”? Were a fulfilled moment or a fulfilled hour really enough to make you stop asking if you had failed again that day? No use attempting a successful dayâwhy not content ourselves with a “not entirely unsuccessful one”? And if your successful day existed, wasn't your fantasy, however richly and wonderfully it whirred, accompanied by a strange fear of something like an alien planet, and didn't your usual unsuccessful day appear to you as part of the planet earth, as a kind ofâpossibly detestedâhome? As though nothing here below could succeed; except perhaps in grace? in mercy? in grace
and
mercyâif nowadays that didn't imply something improper, undeserved, perhaps even accomplished at someone else's expense? Why now does “successful day” remind me of my dead grandfather,
who in his last days did nothing but scratch the wall of his room with his fingernails, lower down from hour to hour. In view of all the general failure and loss, what does a single success amount to?
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Not nothing.
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The day of which I can say it was “a day,” and the day when I was only passing the time. At the crack of dawn. How have people handled their days up to now? How is it that in old stories we often find “Many days were fulfilled,” in place of “Many days passed”? Traitor to the day: my own heart. It drives me out of the day, it beats, it hammers me out of it, hunter and hunted in one. Be still! No more secret thoughts. Leaves in my garden shoes. Out of the cage of revolving thought. Be still. Bend down under the apple tree. Go into a crouch. The crouching reader. At knee height, things coalesce to form an environment. And he prepares for the daily injury. Spreads his toes. “The seven days of the garden.” That's what the unwritten sequel to
Don Quixote
should be called. To be in the garden, to be on earth. The rate of the earth's rotation is irregular, that's why the days are of unequal length, especially in view of the mountain ranges' resistance to the wind. The success of the day and passivity. Passivity as action. He let the fog drift outside the window; he let the grass blow behind the house. Letting the sun shine on one was an activity; now I'm going to let my forehead be warmed, now my eyeballs, now my kneesâand now it's time for teddy-bear warmth between my
shoulder blades. The sunflower head does nothing but follow the sun. Compare the successful day with Job's day. Instead of “value the moment,” it should be “heed” the moment. The course of the dayâthanks precisely to its rough spots, if taken to heartâis in itself a kind of transubstantiationâmore than anything else, it can tell me
what I am.
Pause in your endless restlessness, and you will find rest in your flight. And by resting in his flight, he began to hear. Hearing, I am at my peak. Thanks to my keen hearing, I can hear the whirring of a sparrow's wing through the noise. When a leaf falls on the line of the distant horizon, I hear it deep inside me as a ringing. Listening as a safecracker with his jimmy listens for the clicking of the gears. Slowed by flight, the blackbird's hop-skip-jump over the hedge is humming a tune for me. Just as some people hum when reading a book. (But the most you can expect of a newspaper reader is a whistling between the teeth.) “Seeing you are dull of hearing,” stormed the zealot in one of his epistles, and in another: “Stop disputing over mere words, it does no good and only bedevils those who listen.” A pure tone. If only I could produce a pure tone once for a whole day. Perhaps more important than hearing is pure presenceâPicasso's last wife, for example, is said to have done nothing, just to have been present in his studio. A successful day, a hard day. Suddenly, as I was raking the garden leaves, a rooster's foot gleamed candlelight yellow from out of the pile of brownish leaves. Colors darken, form brightens. In the shady corner, where the ground is still frozen hard, my footsteps sound as they did that day in the rushes.