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Excerpt from Nadja, 1928
:
"Who am I? If this
once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount
to knowing whom I 'haunt.' I must admit that this last word is misleading,tending
to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger,
more inescapable, more disturbing than I intended. Such a word means much
more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently
referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am. Hardly
distorted in this sense, the word suggests that what I regard as the objective,
more or less de liberate manifestations of my existence are merely the
premises, within the limits of this existence, of an activity whose true
extent is quite unknown to me. My image of the "ghost," including everything
conventional about
its appearance as well as its blind submission to certain contingencies
of time and place, is particularly significant for me as the finite representation
of a torment that may be eternal. Perhaps my life is nothing but an image
of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion
that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize
learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten. This sense of myself
seems inadequate only insofar as it presupposes myself, arbitrarily preferring
a completed image of my mind which need not be reconciled with time, and
insofar as it implies-within this same time-an idea of irreparable loss,
of punishment, of a fall whose lack of moral basis is, as I see it, indisputable.
What matters is that the particular aptitudes my day-to-day life gradually
reveals should not distract me from my search for a general aptitude which
would be peculiar to me and which is not innate. Over and above the various
prejudices I acknowledge, the
affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur
to me and to me alone-over and above a sum of movements I am conscious
of making, of emotions I alone experience-I strive, in relation to other
men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from
them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference
that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do,
what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its
fate?"
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