Read When I Was Old for Free Online

little joys which is no doubt infantile, though I have continued to maintain it since I discovered it at twelve or thirteen. A hundred times a day he points to a picture, a flower, a piece of furniture, the design in a carpet, a bedspread, and, as if in ecstasy, gives an ‘Oh … !’ of delight. Everything is beautiful. Everything is a source of pleasure.
    It was the first feeling he expressed, months ago. Will it last? I hope so. Johnny, at ten and a half, still has the same enthusiasm, with the difference that if there is a shadow in a picture, a little fault in an object, a delay in expected joy, he suddenly falls into despair.
    Pierre doesn’t see the shadows yet.
    I myself adjust to them.
Same day, afternoon
    Certain works can be written only by the young. I wonder if this is because they demand more energy – creative energy. In the long run, I think it is because they are affirmative works. Later, one no longer affirms. One asks
questions. But are one’s works less good? They are different.
    If I think this way, is it because I am reaching the age when others have stopped writing novels? Are we inclined to believe – in perfectly good faith – what reassures us?
    This brings me back to people’s good or bad faith. I don’t willingly believe in intrinsic bad faith. This would demand, like true evil, true vulgarity, more strength of character than I see in man. Man needs a certain amount of self-respect. You might say that he comes to terms with what is called his conscience.
    Later, if someone should read these lines, it is possible that he will be amazed that at this moment I have preoccupations which do not appear to be proportionate to reality.
    The Belgian Congo – Cuba – Algeria. A heightened awareness almost everywhere, in students (this delights me), threats of war … if the event were to take place tomorrow, which is not impossible, one would be tempted to say:
    ‘At the edge of cataclysm, a man asked questions about …’
    About very small things of a more or less personal order, I confess.
    I’m not the only one. It has always been that way.
    History happens every day and the importance of events only becomes evident after the fact.
    One doesn’t live with History, or rather one doesn’t live History. One lives his little personal life, or that of a
group, or of an instant of humanity, of an instant in the life of the world.
    Besides, all these little questions which plague me have a relation to what one calls the great questions of reality.
    In rereading the history of the scientific discoveries of the last three or four centuries, especially all those in the field of medicine and biology, I have been amazed to observe that they almost all grew out of the patient observations of naturalists, scholars depicted in popular illustrations as being with wild hair and armed with magnifying glasses, dedicating their lives to a single species, almost always a very lowly one, a fly, a mould, an oyster, a frog …
    These scholars are the only ones whom I envy. True, just like other men, they only rarely arrive at certainties. The further they advance, the more their questions lead only to other questions. However, they do succeed in contributing one solid little stone, one pebble of truth from which others will build edifices of hypothesis. I think of the researchers at the University of Leiden, of the correspondence they exchanged for two or three centuries, from country to country (often in wartime), a few resolute men bent on enlarging their knowledge of the nature of our species. In spite of battles and blockades, the Royal Academy of London corresponded with scholars in Paris and neither one nor the other were considered traitors.
    Like the great naturalists, I would like to focus on certain human mechanisms. Not on grand passions. Not on questions of ethics or morality.
    Only to study the minor machinery which may
appear secondary. That is what I try to do in my books. For this reason I choose