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characters who are ordinary rather than exceptional men. The too-intelligent man, the too-sophisticated, has a tendency to watch himself living, to analyse himself, and, by that very process, his behaviour is falsified.
    I devote myself, in short, to the least common denominator.
    If I were capable of understanding snails or earthworms, I would be happy to write a novel about snails or worms, and I would no doubt learn more about life and about man this way than in drawing my characters from contemporary man.
    In interviews, I often speak of the naked man in contrast to the clothed man.
    What a dream to go back, if it were possible, like the biologist, to the unicellular organisms!
    Pierre woke up and we went to do errands in town. With the three children. Three and not four because Marc is married. Next there will be two left with us, then one, then … It’s true that Pierre is only a little over a year old. My mother will be eighty next week. I don’t know her well, and she knows me still less.
    Isn’t this inevitable since I left her when I was nineteen? We lived nineteen years together, during which I was first a baby, then a little boy barely aware of the world, then a student more interested in his teachers and comrades than in his family, and finally, at fourteen, fifteen years old, a secretive boy.
    Isn’t it always this way? Marc too left at twenty. Do I know him any better than my mother knows me, although for those twenty years I observed him as passionately as I observe his brothers and his sister?
    Of our children too, all we know is a moment, a fraction of their development. They, for their part, only know of us the person we are at a given period.
    On that we judge each other.
    How not to be mistaken? Marc’s friends in Paris know a man whom I can only guess at, and his wife too knows him better than my wife and I, who raised him.
    The naturalist is luckier: he can study within a species a certain number, a great number, even generations.
    As for us, we only know the second half of the generation that precedes us and the first half of the one that follows us.
    As for our own generation, is it possible for us to see it with a clear eye? One has only to look at old classmates or fellow members of a regiment who meet and warm to each other when their only shared point is having been born in the same year in the same town, or of having passed eighteen months in the same camp.
    A man who had seen four or five generations born and dead, for example, would be interesting to listen to. On condition, of course, of being able to understand him. Wouldn’t he risk having himself locked up?
    P.S. Perhaps it will be objected that we have the lessons of history at our disposal. But history has only been lived and written by men who can draw on a maximum of eighty or ninety years. Same for philosophers. No, in
the understanding of man (the opposite of the so-called sciences) the experiences of one and another cannot be placed end to end. They are superimposed. Perhaps each erases the preceding one. To put it another way, men cannot be added up. They replace each other. So that isolation appears to be a miracle – or an accident, in the least agreeable sense of the word.
    Enough, poor Jo! It’s time to go take a walk with the children, who still think you have answers for all their questions.
21 July, morning
    Sun in my study. Going to go into town with Johnny and Marie-Jo. I’ve always loved the city in the morning, especially on a nice morning, when the shops are tidying up. It’s a little like a stage being set. I remember pubs in Liège, on the Rue de la Cathédrale, for example. Sun on the sidewalk. Inside, a bluish shadow, and the waiter, not yet dressed for the day, sweeping up the sawdust or spreading it afresh. Smell of beer. Barrels of beer rolled on the sidewalk, and enormous brewery horses which wait, sometimes striking the pavement with their hooves. Their conspicuously enormous stallion’s member