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Finally, I have some plans for this term: to continue with German and English very seriously, to set to work with you on music, to discuss things with you, certainly more than last term; finally, I’m always thinking about finding intelligent friends with whom to play music, say, or to voice one’s thought. I ask only one thing of them: to be “nonconformists,” “companions of David, Davidsbündler.”22 But to explain that would take me too long.
Excuse me for having talked only about myself; feel free not to read my letter to the very end. Goodbye, my dear friend, see you soon (I am returning to school Friday afternoon!).
Best to you,
R. Barthes
* * *
Bayonne, July 23, [1934]
My very dear friend,
You must not be annoyed with me for not writing. It is not that I’m not thinking of you; on the contrary I miss you very much and the thoughts that I subject you to in my imagination are hardly “literary.” But I cannot express to you how difficult it is for me to write right now. My thinking is not dulled, just the opposite. Since I have been sick, my life has become much more intense, much sharper.23 I’m becoming more aware of myself, if you will. Thus I have in mind many ideas for novels. But I cannot bring myself to write. I think it’s simply because it wears me out. So, do not be annoyed with me. We must let this phase pass; all I ask is that you write as often as you can because I look forward to your letters, and that you don’t require a regular correspondence from me at the moment. Make that very Christian effort of giving without the hope of receiving. I would like for us to be above the conventions of correspondences and for us both to be aware of these small crises that make it impossible to accomplish minor acts even with major effort. There is certainly a very rare grandeur in respecting these mysterious caprices of being.
I don’t believe I ever thanked you for collecting my books from Mme. Guex. Well, I’m thanking you now because you certainly were brave. I’m going to get back to work in August; you’re so kind to offer to send me those papers about the baccalaureate. But send me only those you consider truly indispensable.
Of course I’m much better than when I left. Still I am not very happy with my health. I have to say that my discontent comes especially from the terrible uncertainty I have about my actual condition. I’ve fallen into the psychology of the sick person; the smallest thing frightens me, the smallest thing reassures me. I spend the day making inferences, looking for correlations between symptoms and external causes. You have no idea of all the thoughts that come into my head. Tuberculosis is a serious condition that leads very quickly to death, either in fact or in one’s imagination. Then on top of that, all those who don’t have it, and who do not show the least regard for the one who does, assign to it all kinds of mysterious powers and create a real panic in and around the one who is sick. Although it’s not in the least a shameful disease (and in truth, are there shameful diseases?), it is treated that way. I think that’s stupid and dangerous.
And now that my prospects of leaving grow so distant, my desire to leave is greatest, especially to go abroad. I am not ungrateful or an anarchist, but I am beginning to tire of French conformism. I’m passing through a wave of anticonformism. You cannot imagine what disgust I now have for politics, especially the politics of “President Doumergue” and all the fine words written on this subject.24 It is grotesque. Moreover the Socialists and Communists do not escape conformism. As for the radicals, in this regard they deserve a good beating.
In literature and in music, conformism is less irritating to me, because it only involves a small minority and because, for the moment, I tremble with horror at the endless stupidity of the masses.
I have not yet left for England where I would like to live for many years if possible. In the meantime, I hope to see you very soon, in September in any case, if you don’t come for a short visit in August, as I may ask you to do, later.
Affectionately, your friend,
Roland Barthes
* * *
[Bedous,] Thursday, [December 28, 1934]
Dear Rebeyrol,
Although I sent you a fairly long letter just yesterday, I’m answering your letter today. As you say, letters are tangible evidence of affectionate and ever-present thought; I’m becoming very aware of that through the negative form of the proposition. I’m very, very happy that you were thinking of me during a time when someone other than you so easily and justifiably had forgotten me. Everything you tell me I well know, despite being several hundred meters south of you. I know the quality of your exhilaration, I’ve seen what you are seeing, the snow in the blue sky. Here I cannot praise the air’s clarity so much as its softness. Today I returned from Osse about five o’clock and the evening was like an evening in June, very clear, the Spanish wind, our god, making the already mild air even milder still. I tell you, along the deserted road I had the mad desire to stretch out in the grass, to dissolve into the earth, that solemn inert thing that is really the most illustrious example of fertility, of life. In that moment, I hated humans. I would have been happier as tree or dust, any participant in the communism of nature. I would have given anything not to feel excluded from that vast organism, at the gates of which I weep as before a forbidden—or lost—paradise. (On this subject, I’m surprised that literature has not explored further the clear ties between love of nature and splenetic Romanticism.)
Christianity was the source of many paradoxes; among the most dazzling and hateful is the one you note: that revelers celebrate the nativity. I see no greater Christian crime than the celebration of Christmas; we see the extravagant success of that institution just as much among the hypocritical and indifferent. As for me, would you believe it? I had a very orthodox, sweet, and peaceful Christmas. What in much of the world is only drunkenness and Gallic behavior was for me a sweet dream, the benefits of which I will feel long after. The night of December 24, I went to bed at nine thirty, I read a little Saint-Évremond25 (a man of good sense and subtle wit if there ever was one) and a little Luke.26 Tuesday morning I went to the pretty little church in Osse, which is very old and very rustic. The pastor I like very much, M. Bost, who is a fanatic supporter of the SDN.27 I was welcomed there in a touching manner. I received communion. Surely you do not know this, my dear Rebeyrol, but Protestant communion has a beauty and grandeur that truly compensate for the errors of that religion. That evening we had a small Christmas tree at home as is the custom each year. At least God will have nothing very much to blame me for that day and the following one. I decorated the church Christmas tree and you should have seen me balancing on a ladder a good part of the time, hanging shiny garlands on the branches of the “king of the forest” or measuring the cotton powder. Bost, his hat askew, passed me the candles. I leave for Bayonne on Saturday.
Our letters crossed; you cannot have seen in mine that I reminded you of the music, and you told me you could do without my warnings. Now that you went to the concert all alone, you no longer need me; as soon as one enters that enchanted forest, all paths are good and the guide is nothing but a hindrance. I am sad to be releasing a victim simultaneously so docile and so intelligent.
Write to me, please; consider my pleasure at hearing from you about such a fine symphonic piece.
Very affectionately,
Barthes
In the attached photos you see: 1. The village of Bedous and the valley, in the heart of the Thermopyles (below, narrow pass).28 You can see the main road that goes to Spain. 2. The house you see at the end of the road is Maison Larricq, where we live.29 The third window is my mother’s room, where I have my piano.
My writing is better than Clément Vautel’s.30 My apologies nevertheless.
* * *
Bedous, Monday, August 13, 193531
Dear friend,
If I haven’t written to you, it’s because I am in love, madly in love with a charming girl, sixteen years old, named Mima. Mima has very brown hair, skin, and eyes. Perhaps it’s because I am blond and have bl
ue eyes. She has a little something about her that might be called “comical” or “funny” or “amusing,” which I myself find adorable. It is exactly the “je ne sais quel charme” that Corneille talks about.32 We have still not spoken very much and I do not want to say much more about her. Sometimes I run into her, with her family, at the Bousquet’s grocery, and it makes me happy for two days. Sunday evening there was a public dance at the square and we danced together. She does not know how to dance and neither do I—absolutely delightful regardless. We certainly make a charming couple. But I see that I haven’t told you enough about her grace, and nevertheless I can’t tell you more. I would have to represent to you—and what art would be sufficient—the exact proportions in which her lightness, harmony, seriousness, and childishness are combined, her voice, a bit deep, the voice of a child who is no longer one, her little surprised air, etc., etc. (I’m not ashamed of the Romantic cliché). She has the loveliest little white hat that she wears tilted back a bit over her very dark hair, which contributed greatly to her conquest.
I have long thought of her, the little Musset heroine circa 1935, who has worked her way into my life—oh so little and so much—with a whole parade of such poetic things: the dance, the hat, a few trite words exchanged at the pelota party, and then she appeared to me in the path full of flowers and sunlight.… All this tremendously Romantic imagery. All these little repeated Faustian incidents and other adventures that prompt in me the charm and suffering that all love distills. Why tell you all this? Is it in earnest or literary or ironic? A bit of each. I don’t know, I don’t know; I’m letting myself be swept up in this wave of poetry, this wave of beauty, this wave of banality as well.
But here is where things become Cornelian. Alas, Mima’s family is as unpleasant as she is adorable. It’s the old story. Mima has a cousin, Annie who is a very pretty young woman, more classically beautiful but lacking Mima’s charm. I cannot stand Annie. Vain, affected, scornful, she has all the exasperating faults of a pretty girl. Annie feigns great affection for Mima, who is a few years younger than she is. Mima, good girl that she is, cannot escape it. And it’s already inconvenient enough that Annie is always by Mima’s side, chaperoning her, monopolizing her, never letting her answer, not even letting her make an appearance. Mima has a cousin Jean, who is Annie’s brother. I cannot set eyes on this fellow without wanting to hit him a few times. Ill-bred, extremely arrogant, proud, but a bit less intelligent than Pascal’s man, he’s a distillate of everything I detest in life. All my hatreds, phobias, dislikes, indignations, stupefactions I find in him, hideously alive and breathing. This feeling of repulsion translates into a physical urge to smack him. Now the worst of it, my friend, is that just at the time when I am occasionally reawakening to antifascism and socialism, this fellow takes it upon himself to be fanatical burning cross, a rabid militarist. And I am coming to the actual facts behind this business. On Saturday there was an open (and public) meeting here against fascism in which a communist professor, Verdier, spoke. At this speaker’s first words, young Jean began shouting; he had a serious fit of hysterics; his father and mother got mixed up in it and in the midst of the shouts and insults, you could hear them calling the audience imbeciles and idiots. You understand that after this debacle they’re not viewed very well in these parts.
You understand too that it’s sad to fall in love in such a family.
All this is as tragic as one of Corneille’s third acts. So much poetic lightness balanced by so much hideousness.…
Poor Mima, so true and so innocent—“oh so charming, charming”—in this tangle of pride, fanaticism, idiocy, and spite. She’s like one of those medieval princesses locked up in a faraway castle among dark demons. All that’s missing are the two braids flying in the wind from the top of her tower, a sign that makes the noble knight’s heart pound as he speeds across the plain to rescue her.
Dear friend, excuse your friend who so shamelessly tells you things that are not worth your trouble, that perhaps he never thought about this way, and perhaps he invented so as not always to be telling you the same thing.
Very affectionately,
Barthes
I’m thinking of you and will write to you more intelligently very soon. Because this letter must have been such a disappointment to you.
I’m attaching a note to give to Brissaud, please.33
* * *
Paris, March 1, [1939]
My dear Philippe,
I haven’t forgotten you and think of you very often, but if I haven’t written it’s because I don’t have the heart to send a few lines offering a bit of trivial news. With you, I always want very full letters and I often feel distressed at not being able to provide you nearly so many of them as I used to, because it’s almost as though I don’t know how to write any longer, having lost the power to truly ponder, as I really could to some extent in my early youth, at the time of our wonderful correspondence. I always have the impression that since that time of relative strength, I’ve continually been in a state of crisis, unresolved crisis, without the beautiful aspects of the crises of heroes in novels. What’s more, you have registered this each time you’ve seen me and you no doubt understand that my instability and inner weakness must be allowed to ripen until a path emerges in one direction or another.
All this became very clear to me through a visit I made to a Benedictine monastery near Bruges, where we went with the Théophiliens.34
I was extremely affected by this twenty-four-hour visit. I’m still disoriented and disconcerted by it; I have yet to come back to my senses and I have the impression that my friends here find me bizarre. To them I must seem to be in a bad mood, a bit short-tempered, and tired (as you see, nothing very good!), whereas in reality and from within, it’s more that I am dumbfounded (that is the word for it) by the revelation of this monastic world that moreover—I do myself this justice—I have never ridiculed or underestimated because I have always had infinite respect and secret envy for everything Catholic.
You understand of course that this is not in the least a religious revelation because God and Christ are—for the moment—a whole other discussion. So it’s not at all one of those sudden mystical flights toward God, which must be hard because the fall, so likely to follow, is unpleasant. What truly disoriented—more than moved—me is the vision of such a perfect, fruitful stability for which all the daily means and materials for nurturing it seemed to me supremely intelligent and effective. I think that any humanist can feel the weight and incomparable transcendent value of Catholic ceremonies; but finally among these monks—who are so compatible as well—one feels real contact with the absolute, in every moment of every day. Whether it’s through the very beautiful practices of daily life, or through the day’s thousand religious formalities, or through the actual worship in which it seemed to me that, except for the catechism, I amazingly grasped the most profound spirit. I must tell you that we lived the life of these Benedictines for twenty-four hours, eating in their refectory, attending services, sleeping in cells. Naturally I will forgo the usual clichés about the peace, serenity, joy, and certitude that emanate from those men and from that monastery, even though all that is absolutely true.
But I confess that these lines, more or less expressing what that visit meant to me, do not explain in the least the bizarre revolution that took place in me, coming in contact—however strained it was in that moment—with this monastic world. The fact is that I feel everything. Is this more than superficial? I really do not know. I’m waiting to see. I can say that deep down I fear so. Whatever happens, I believe I have experienced a very beautiful emotion. But what primarily intrigues me is that this expression, “beautiful emotion,” does not satisfy me. It’s something else entirely that I felt, that I am feeling, an emotion that is not qualitative, and that absolutely does not happen on the level of the emotions I’ve experienced until now.
But maybe I’m exaggerating all this. Who can say?
Send me your news soon, dear
Philippe. Everything is going well here, I’m a bit tired, that’s all.
I send you all my faithful and affectionate thoughts.
Your friend,
Roland
Basically, what I really feel is a great emptiness inside me; I have no taste for anything, and I feel as though this is mysteriously tied to my visit with those Benedictines. It’s an extremely peculiar kind of depression. At any moment, I strongly grasp this within myself.
* * *
Biarritz, Thursday, [March] 7, [1940]
My dear Philippe,
Your letter made me very happy and I’m glad to sense your calm. It takes so much for me to be at peace. It’s difficult for me to speak of all this in a letter, but I am thinking so much of everything that’s happening in our country and in the world, and I am frequently seized with fear, not for the physical future of our race but for our moral future. When I read the newspapers, when I listen to the radio, when I hear the news, I’m routinely appalled by the stupidity, the self-important vanity, and the shortsighted miscalculations of our fellow citizens. Yes, I tell you, I’m alternately angry or sad; both. I think that mine is the country of La Bruyère and Napoleon and in the final count, nothing, it seems, remains of all those games of great and victorious intelligence that make us so proud of being French. I cannot say anything; I must speak and especially with you, that would do me good. My heart is heavy because I have been struck dumb until now by the onset of this inevitable war, but now I’m more and more struck by cruel flashes of lucidity. Me, whose thinking has never been tied to the problems of the world, who understood nothing about it, my eyes are gradually opening and I have the impression that I can see just how everything is happening and even how everything will happen. And my powerlessness, my silence, that of others, make me suffer cruelly. At times I truly feel as though the harsh truth is burning me, and frantic, I stop short at the edge of an abyss.