His fascination with death was what propelled Malraux’s sole existence: most of all, his tics and his grimaces, his aphasic silences when he faced you, his rapid discerning of an event, an accidental one, whether it be in politics or in art, the arrest of a policeman in Algeria, the fall of a kingdom in any part of the world, say Oceania, a new race of termites suddenly uncovered in the Andes, the discovery of magical geometry in the hair pins of the pharaohs, the universe of all of mythology, African, Indian, Chinese, Sumerian, were all escapes from this inevitable leap of man into the abysm of time. The Western man, historically bound man, with his implication of but one life (of three score and ten) is frightened the end will come before the stretch of life has even begun, his earnest, heavy, bootlegged march under the pictures of hell at the entrance of every cathedral, of Strasbourg or Rheims, of Cologne, of Milan, the inevitable darkness into which one will enter—not into no-time, akala, as with us—but into the time, kala, where one will be what, one never knows, because it is beyond our space, thus Paradise distantly so modulated, and thus of a timely time, as it were, which makes every movement a leap, not towards another place or a human situate, but as it were, towards oneself in total annihilation, the mythic hell—thus the fear of what Baudelaire called the Néont, that is nothing-nothingness. And there has never been a man in European history maybe since Leonardo, which seemed to have filled his life, with speculation and event, with the intensity of squashing images, inventing one simple symbol after the other, till the end becomes big and breaks into a no-thing, so the thing, la chose, the architectured image of the non-existent self, which then becomes, the self, the person, who appears before God in the form God gave him, so Christianity tells you, and even were you not a believing Christian, you have this tragic mask which you bear when alive—hence the tics and grimaces of occidental man. There was never an intellectual in all of Europe since the Renaissance, again, who faced it all with such outraged fascination, and with such momentous courage—such fierce self-involvement—which gave him, this dire fearful obstinacy, as did André Malraux. Hence, his fascination with Egypt, and the dead-alive, and the liberated-in-life, the Jivan Mukta, of India. There is again no country, I should think Malraux ever loved as he loved India (sometimes he would say to me, ‘Nous autres hindoues’1) and no man he ever loved, so far as I know, as he did Jawaharlal Nehru, and he did so with such decisive passion. He certainly respected General De Gaulle most of all, but, I repeat, he loved no man as he did Jawaharlal Nehru.2 I remember his calling his wife, Madelaine, one afternoon towards him, across the living room of his house in Boulogne,3 Boulevard Victor Hugo, leaning against the large piano, Nehru’s biography in hand, and saying to her, his finger opened on a page, ‘Look, look, is this not a beautiful, beautiful face? Look at it. A politician, a saint, a poet. My brother,’ he almost seemed to say but would not. He was not modest. No. He was the most arrogant man in the France of his time except perhaps it be General De Gaulle. But, in Malraux, as in General De Gaulle, there was the certain Christian, the Catholic, soul not tortured by sin, but by sainthood—that is what Catholicism is about—and so not to say I, is to say ‘I, I.’ Whereas with Ramana Maharshi, to say ‘I’ is to say the no-I but the only I, the truth.