You who travel little, you who never travel: still, there comes the odd day when you happen to take a train. At the station there are lots of businessmen. You can spot them from a distance, by their missing faces. The same man, in dozens of copies. The same young man, old in his words, embalmed in his future. You look at them somewhat fearfully, the way as a child you used to look at dried-up old people with their somber voices. The train pulls in. It's one of those express trains invented by these businessmen, for their personal convenience. There is a straight line of light-colored carriages. There is a clutch of cold wind that flattens fields and empties them of their furrows, their accents, their nerves. These are fields deserted by gazes, by men, by beasts; lowly clumps of earth tossed to the dogs of speed. The countryside is a void now, and so you pass through it quickly. And confronted with this void of countryside you become acquainted with the mass-produced man, the absent man: he goes from Paris to Tokyo, from Tokyo to New York. He goes everywhere on an electric earth, like a corpse laid out in death. He takes trains, the kind that go from one point to another. From nothing to nothing. In his haste he takes the void with him. However often he speaks, he hears only himself. However far he goes, he finds only himself. Wherever he goes he leaves behind a stain of gray; he sleeps in the midst of what he sees. And so you say to yourself: these people who travel so much never take a single step forward. To really see something, you have to touch its opposite. You've never been able to see anything in any other way: through shadow you go towards light. Through indifference you reach love. It's the same with these men in their luxury trains, their night flights. It's the same with these men, annihilated by the financial sameness they carry with them: when you see them, you discover a type of man that they do not know how to reduce, a man who goes much farther than just the ends of the earth. When you see them you discover the man who has been displaced and confused. Who has found no consolation for an excess of childhood or of hunger. On his face are all the skies; in his heart, all the voices. Thus, there are two types of man. The motionless man of long business trips—he has a position in the world. He works so to become one with his position. He extracts cold matter, dead languages, from that place. Reason, ambition, power. He feels equally at ease in industry and morality, in love affairs and bank accounts. He eliminates any differences in his language. He can spread this illness of self wherever he goes. He can be everywhere because he is timeless. The businessman is merely the latest avatar, the most recent version of the pale man. The pale man is the social man, the useful man, convinced of his usefulness. He is the man with the weakest identity— that of keeping things in their place, that of the eternal lie of living in society.
And then there is that other type of man. A useless fellow. Wonderfully useless. He certainly didn't invent the wheelbarrow, ATM cards, or nylon stockings. He never invents a thing. He neither adds to nor takes away from the world: he leaves it. Or he finds that the world has left him, it's the same thing. You might see him here or there, driving his flock of thoughts before him. He dreams in every language. You can see him from a long way off: he's like those men in the desert, those blue men. He's like those people with their flesh tinted from the cloth that protects them from the sun. His heart is seized with blue. You see him here and there, in the uprisings he inspires, in the flames that devour him. In the books he writes. It is in order to see him that you read. For your nomadic hours, for the fresh breeze of a phrase beneath the draperies of ink. You go from book to book, from encampment to encampment: there's no end to reading. It's like love, like hope, and it's hopeless. One day you read Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. The story takes place in your childhood country, Russia. You've never left the town where you were born, a little French town saddened by industry, you dread travel of any kind, you've always gone to meet your childhood in a dream of Russia, in the snow of a silence, the white fur of a voice. Pasternak's book is a long one, a book for a great hunger, a story like life itself, with thousands of candles dancing beneath thousands of faces. Words, gestures, letters. Horses, fires. Low-hanging boughs of fire in the forest of the soul. You open the book on a Friday evening, you come to the last page on Sunday, during the night. After that you have to go out and go back into the world. It's difficult, so difficult to move from what is useless—reading—to what is useful—lies. When you emerge from a great book you always experience a certain malaise, a time of discomfort. As if someone could read inside you. As if the book you have loved has given you a transparent—indecent—face: you can't go out into the street with a face so raw with happiness. You have to wait for a while, wait for the dust of words to scatter into the daylight. You can't remember much of what you read, perhaps just a phrase. You're like a child who’s been shown a castle, but who remembers only a certain detail, a tuft of grass between two stones, as if the castle's true power lay in the trembling of a frenzied tuft of grass. The books you have loved are mixed with the bread you eat. They will know the same fate as the faces you've glimpsed, as the limpid days of autumn, as all beauty in life: they will have no knowledge of the gateway to consciousness, they slip into you through a window of dreaming and find their way into a room where you never go, the deepest, most remote room. Hours and hours of reading for this light coloring of the soul, this infinitesimal variation of what is invisible inside you, in your voice, your eyes, the way you move, the way you act. What is the purpose of reading? Nothing, or almost nothing. It's like loving, or playing. It's like praying. Books are rosaries of black ink, each bead rolling between your fingers, word after word. And what is prayer, after all? It is the creation of silence, a motion away from oneself, into silence. Maybe it’s impossible, maybe we don't know how to pray as we should: there's always too much noise on our lips, there are always too many things in our heart. In churches no one prays, only the candles do. They shed all their blood, consume all their wick, and keep nothing for themselves; they give what they are, and this gift becomes light. The finest image of prayer, the clearest image of one's reading, yes, would be this: the slow burning of a candle in a cold church. What is left, now, of Pasternak's great book: a face. The face of a man separated from his lover by thousands of winters. This face is in shadow; the man is seated at a table in a wooden house lost in the forest. He is writing a letter. It's a long, endless letter. The ink darkens a number of sheets. That's it. The names and events are forgotten, all erased. Everything is frozen beneath the smooth surface of the page. What remains is the fever of the reading—a pleasant weakness that takes a long time to fade. The same weakness that you experience after love, or towards the end of a walk. It's almost fatigue, but a special kind of fatigue, a restful one. When you encounter books, nature, or love, it is like being twenty years old: at the beginning of the world, and of yourself.
You don't move. You watch the trains pull out, one by one. You watch the people who will board the trains, the businessmen, those pale men. They talk while they wait, about uninteresting things to do with money. You stand right by them but you cannot hear their voices: there is a louder noise, the scratching of a pen on paper. An endless sound, as if the person writing were absorbed by an infinite task. A quiet sound like that of snow upon a little wooden house in Russia, promised land.
Christian Bobin is the author of more than forty short works, including The Very Lowly: A Meditation on Francis of Assisi. He lives in Le Creusot, France.
Alison Anderson is the author of the novels Darwin's Wink and Hidden Latitudes. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for her translations of four short works by Christian Bobin in 2004. She lives in a small village in French-speaking Switzerland.