I often think of those solitary souls, too full of isolation, who walk alongside the world the way one follows a riverbank without ever stepping into the water. Without this vice of writing every day, one or two pages or more, without this strange habit that tears me away from the restfulness of ordinary hours, I might perhaps have tasted a simpler happiness, made of shared silences and self-forgetfulness. My pen, always ready to dip itself into the ink of my own reveries, exiles me from an immediate happiness, easy, almost vulgar at times in its obviousness.

And yet, unless it is the other way around, unless this strange discipline, austere like an inner cloister, is my only path toward a higher, rarer joy. For in condemning me to writing, it also grants me the right to approach the unsayable, to name shadow and light, to make meaning rise where reality offered only mute chaos. Happiness then is not given, it is earned, through effort, through accepted solitude, through the ascetic practice of words aligned day after day.

It is thus, perhaps only thus, that it becomes possible to brush with one’s fingertips that elusive happiness, like a bird that never settles. In a morning of writing, in a sentence that is finally right, in the secret accord between the soul and the world, no one knows whether this contact is enough to fill a life, but it illuminates existence with a grave and profound glow, like those twilights when one senses that the night will be beautiful. I pity the others, the “Page,” the “Seigneur,” and the “Mumuse,” wandering souls to whom this happiness was denied, who pass through life as though beneath a starless sky.

FM