Friday

 By Michel Tournier

He stopped two paces away from it. Out of the mass of hair a single green eye with a dark oval pupil was staring at him. Robinson recalled that, owing to the wide set of their eyes, the majority of quadrupeds can look at things only in a one-eyed fashion, and that a charging bull cannot see the adversary it is charging. A strange sound issued from the hairy statue obstructing his path, like a deep belly chuckle. With fear exacerbating his state of extreme fatigue, Robinson was overtaken by a violent fit of anger. Raising his cudgel, he brought it down with all his strength between the goat’s horns. There was a crunching sound, the animal sank on its knees and then rolled over on its side. It was the first living creature Robinson had encountered on the island, and he had killed it. 

And

as 

Today I can measure the folly and malice of those who affect to despise money, that divine institution. Money spirstualizes all that it touches by endowing it with a quality that is both rational (measurable) and universal, since property reckoned in terms of money is accessible to all men. Venality is one of the cardinal virtues. The venal man suppresses bis murderous and anti-social instincts-honor, selfpride, patriotism, political ambition, religious fanaticism, racialism-in favor of his need to co-operate with others, bis love of fruitful exchanges, his sense of buman solidarity. The term, the Golden Age, should be taken literally, and I see now that mankind would swiftly achieve tt were its affairs wholly in the bands of venal men. Alas, it is nearly always high-minded men who make lnstory, and so the flames destroy everything and blood flows in torrents. The plump merchants of Venice afford us an example of the luxurious happiness possible in a state governed solely by the law of lucre, whereas the emaciated wolves of the Spanish Inquisition show us the infamies of which men are capable when they have lost the love of material well-being. The Huns would soon have checked their advance if they had known how to profit by the riches they acquired. Encumbered with their gains, they would have stayed to enjoy them, and life would have resumed its course. But they were disinterested savages. They despised gold. They rushed onward, burning as they went. 

&

His meditations took another course. He became interested in the proceedings of a male hymenoptera which visited only one variety of orchid, and not, it seemed, for the purpose of foraging. Robinson spent long hours with his glass trying to determine what the creature was doing. He noted first that the flower was an exact reproduction of the abdomen of the female insect, to the point of offering a sort of vagina which probably exuded a specific aphrodisiac scent calculated to attract and seduce the male. The insect did not pilfer the flower for its nectar; rather it teased it, and then made love to it according to its own methods of propagation. In doing so its posture was such that the pollen contained in two sacs was deposited on its forehead, where it adhered to two sticky scales; and thus adorned with vegetable scales, the deceived lover flew from male to female flower, serving the orchid species while believing it furthered its own affairs. This wonderful mingling of subterfuge and ingenuity was enough to make one doubt the sobriety of the Creator. Had the natural world been contrived by an infinitely wise and majestic God, or by a baroque Demiurge driven to the wildest whimsicalities by his love of the bizarre? Repressing these doubts, Robinson reflected that there might be trees on the island which, like the orchids with the hymenoptera, might be disposed to make use of himself for the transference of their pollen. And the branches of the trees were transformed in his mind into voluptuous and scented women whose rounded bodies were waiting to receive him... 

This process of insemination at a distance, devised by the cruelly separated plants, seemed to Robinson both moving and supremely elegant, and he even dreamed of some fantastic variety of bird which, after charging itself with the seed of the Governor of Speranza, would fly to York to fecundate his deserted wife. But he reflected that being so long without news of him, she must now consider herself a widow, if indeed she had not abandoned widowhood to marry again. 

&

Journal 

Last night my right arm, which was hanging down from my couch, went to sleep, or “died.” I took it in my left hand and lifted it up, that lifeless, heavy object of flesh and bone that might have been a part of some other person, attached to me in error. I dream of thus handling my whole body, marveling at the dead weight, lost in the paradox of this thing which is myself. But is it really me? I remember my feeling as a child when, being taken into a church in York, I saw a stained-glass window depicting the martyrdom of St. Denis. The saint had been decapitated on the steps of the Temple, and the headless body bent down and picked up the head in its two big hands... . What caused me to marvel was not merely this evidence of prodigious vitality, To me in my infant piety the divine miracle was a commonplace, and besides, I had myself seen a duck running with its bead cut off. No, the true marvel was that being deprived of his head, St. Denis had sought for it in the stream into which it had rolled, and that he had picked it up so carefully, with such affectionate solicitude. If it were I who had been beheaded | would certainly not have gone running after that unsightly object whose red hair and freckles were the bane of my life! How bitterly I deplored them, my flaming head of hair, long, skinny arms, legs like stilts, and white body like that of a plucked goose with here and there a fluff of pinkish down. My hearty dislike of all this gave me a view of myself which has only achieved its fullness on Speranza. For some time indeed I have been performing an act of surgery on myself which consists of stripping away in turn all my attributes-I say all-like peeling an onion. And at the same time I am constructing, separate from myself, a man called Crusoe, Christian name Robinson, six feet tall, etc. ... and I watch him live and grow on this island, without participating in his good fortune or suffering from his bad luck. What “I” is this? The question is far from an idle one, nor is it even unanswerable. Because if it is not him then it must be Speranza. There is a fiuttering “I” which comes to rest now on the man and now on the island, making of me one and the other by turns. 

Is this not what is called “philosophy,” this that I have just written? What strange transformation is taking place within me that I, the most positive and least speculative of men, should be not only putting such questions to myself but, as it would seem, answering them! I must return to this matter, 

Journal 

That strange amazement with which we open our eyes in the morning! Nothing better testifies to the fact that sleep is an experience in its own right, and as it were a rehearsal of death. Of all the things that can happen to the sleeper, awakening is certainly the one he least expects, and the one for which he is least prepared. No nightmare can so greatly dismay him as that sudden return to light, another light. There can be no doubt that for the sleeper the act of sleeping is final. The soul bas taken flight from the body without a backward look or thought of return. It has forgotten everything, cast everything aside, when suddenly and barsbly it is compelled to resume the discarded garment of flesh, its babits and its life.... 

So presently I shall lie down and let myself slip into the darkness forever. A strange alienation. The sleeper is a mina unbinged that thinks itself dead. 

The problem of existence. If someone bad told me a few years ago that the absence of my fellows would cause me to doubt my own existence I would have laughed, just as I did when “universal consent” was offered as a proof of the existence of God. “The majority of men at all trmes and in all places have believed in the existence of God. Therefore God exists.” How absurd! The most absurd of all the proofs of the existence of God, miserably insufficient compared with that marvel of force and subtlety, the ontological argument.

But now I know otherwise. | know that untversal consent is the only proof-and not only of the existence of God.

To exist-what do the words mean? It means to be outside-sistere ex. That which is outside exists. That which is within does not. My thoughts, images, and dreams do not exist. If Speranza is no more than a sensation, or bundle of sensations, then she does not exist. And I myself exist only msofar as I escape from myself to join with others. 

What complicates the position is that the thing which does not exist does its utmost to persuade us of the contrary. There is a great and universal urge toward existence among the non-existent. Something like a centrifugal force seeks to spread outward everything that moves within me, images, dreams, projects, fantasies, desires, obsessions. That which does not ex-sist in-sists, It insists upon existing. All the small world contained within me is knocking at the door of the great, the real world, And it ts others, those who are outside, auho hold the key. In the past, when I tossed in my sleep, my wife would shake me by the shoulders to wake me and dispel the insistence of the nightmare, But now... But why do I keep returning to this subject? 

All those who knew me, all without exception, believe me dead. My own belief in my existence is opposed to that unanimous belicf. No matter what | do,I cannot prevent that picture of Robinson's dead body from existing m all ther minds. This alone, though certainly it does not kill me, suffices to remove me to the uttermost confines of life, to a place bung between Heaven and Hell-in a word, to Limbo. Speranza, or the Limbo of the Pacific... 

This state of half-death at least helps me to understand the deep, positive, and seemingly ineluctable relationship between sex and death. Being closer to death than any other man, | am by the same token closer to the very springs of sexuality. 

Sex and death... Their close association was first made clear to me in the dissertations of Samuel Gloaming, an elderly York eccentric, a herbalist and taxidermist, whom I visited now and then of an evening in bis shop filled with stuffed animals and dried herbs, He had devoted a lifetime’s thought to the mysteries of creation, and he said that life was fragmented into an infinite number of entities differing as widely as possible each from the other, so that it might have a no less infinite chance of surviving the vicissitudes of its environment. Were the earth to be frozen to a block of ice, or burned by the sun to a desert of stone, most of the creatures om its surface would perish, but thanks to their variety a few would still remain, capable of adapting themselves to the changed conditions. It was this multiplicity of creatures which in bis view made reproduction necessary, that is to say, the transference of life from the old to the mew; and he insisted that this was a sacrifice of the individual to the species, since in the act of procreation the individual loses something of bis substance, Thus sexuality is the living presence, ominous and mortal, of the species in the essence of the individual. To procreate is to bring forth a new generation which innocently but inexorably will thrust its predecessor toward extinction. No sooner do the parents cease to be indispensable than they begin to become burden. some, The child casts aside bis parents as naturally as he took from them all that he needed for his growth. The instinct which brings the sexes together is then an instinct of death. But Nature bas thought it prudent to disguise ber Stratagem, transparent though it is, and what appears to be the self-indulgence of lovers is in reality a course of mad self-abnegation. 

I bad been pondering these matters when I bad occasion to visit a part of northern Ireland which was grievously afflicted by famine. The survivors strayed like ghostly skeletons along the village streets, and the bodies of the dead were burned on pyres to guard against the risk of plague, more deadly than the famine itself. Most of the corpses were male, so true is it that women are capable of greater endurance than men, and they told a strange story: emaciated though they were, dratned of substance like leathern dolls of string end bone, tbe sexual organ, end this alone, was monstrously end tronically enlarged, more rigid and distended, in a word more triumpbant, than probably it bad ever been in life. This apotheosis in death of the genitals shed an added light on Samuel Gloaming’s words, evoking in my mind a dialogue berween the individual , The affirmation of life, and sex, the affirmation of death. By the light of day man in his right mind represses what is undesirable he diminishes and disdains it but under the influence of darkness warmth and languor the enemy revives and unsheathes his sword and diminishes the man makes of him a lover plunges him into a brief ecstasy then closes his eyes and the lover couched on Earth, lost in the rapture of forgetfulness and renunciation of self sinks into that little death which is sleep.

&

For although Sunday was officially a day of rest, it was not a day of culpable idleness. Rising at dawn, Friday swept and garnished the Meeting Hall. Then he woke his master and recited the morning prayer with him; following which they went together to the Meeting Hall, there to join in a ceremony of worship after the Quaker fashion, lasting two hours. Standing at the lectern, the master read passages from the Scriptures, interrupted by long periods of meditation and enlightened with commentaries inspired by the Holy Spirit. Kneeling on the left side of the Hall, the right being reserved for women, Friday listened devoutly to words such as sin, salvation, hell-fire, damnation, Mammon, and apocalypse, which if they conveyed no precise meaning to his mind, nevertheless had a magical effect, one of obscure, disturbing beauty. And now and then a picture would emerge -for example, of a man swallowed by a whale who escaped unscathed, of a country beset by a plague of frogs so numerous that they were to be found in the beds