Books might have instructed me. I have often heard people bewail their influence; it would be easy to pretend I was their victim: that would perhaps make me more interesting. But books had no effect whatsoever on me. I have never loved books. Every time one opens them one expects some surprising revelation. But every time one closes them one feels a bit more discouraged. In any case, one would have to read everything, and a lifetime would not be enough for that. But books do not contain life; they contain only its ashes—and those ashes are, I suppose, what is called human experience. At home we had a good number of old volumes in a room no one ever went into. They were mostly collections of pious works, printed in Germany, full of that gentle Moravian mysticism that my ancestors liked. I was fond of that sort of book. The loves they depict have all the swooning and transport others do, but they do not contain the remorse. They can give themselves over to it fearlessly. There were also some quite different works (usually in French and written in the eighteenth century) which one does not put into the hands of children. But they did not please me either. Sensual pleasure, I already suspected, is a very grave subject: one should deal seriously with what can cause suffering. I remember certain pages which should have gratified my instincts, or rather awakened them, but which I turned with indifference because the images they offered me were far too precise. Things in life are never precise; and it is a lie to depict them nakedly, since we never see them except through a fog of desire. It is not true that books tempt us, nor do events, since they only tempt us when we are ready to be tempted and at a time when everything can tempt us. It is simply not true that a few coarse details can teach one about love; it is simply not true that it is easy to recognize, in the simple description of an act, the emotions that it will later produce in us. Suffering is one. We speak of suffering as we speak of pleasure, but we speak of them when they do not possess us, when they no longer possess us. Each time they enter into us they create the surprise of a new feeling, and we are obliged to acknowledge that we had forgotten them. They are new, because we are. We bring to them each time a soul and a body slightly modified by life. And yet suffering is always the same. We know only several forms of it, as we do of pleasure, always the same ones, and we are their prisoners. Let me explain: our soul, I think, has only an abbreviated keyboard, and our life, whatever it does, cannot manage more than two or three poor notes. I remember the frightful dullness of certain evenings, when one clung to things as if to surrender to them—my musical excesses or my neurotic need of moral perfection, which was not perhaps anything more than a transposition of desire. I remember certain tears shed when, in truth, there was nothing to cry over. I recognize that all my experiences of grief were already contained within the first one. I have been able to suffer more, but I have not suffered differently; and in any case, each time one suffers one believes one is suffering more. But grief teaches us nothing about its cause. If I assumed anything, I would have assumed I had been infatuated by a woman. The only thing is, I could not imagine which one.