Read When I Was Old for Free Online Page B

hanging almost to the ground.
    I’m beginning to understand why so many writers have kept a notebook, a journal. You write freely, without thinking of the reader. It’s chatting with yourself.
    You can allow yourself to be ridiculous. Yesterday, for
example, I was thinking of Rembrandt. I was reviewing in my mind some of his pictures. And it wasn’t accident that these images came to me. I had just been recalling those men who, in a very few centuries, had created biology, given new dimensions to the world. The father of Cartesianism foreshadowing Darwin and Freud. Perhaps Einstein too.
    Suddenly it seemed to me that these discoveries existed seminally in the pictorial world of Rembrandt. His chiaroscuro is already a critique of pure reason. Man no longer has definite outlines. For the first time the figure is not the essential element. It is part of a whole. Space has more value than man.
    Are painters precursors? I have only to take a few steps, to open a few works to find, on pages which I know, references that would give some weight to this embryo idea. Parallel, with dates to support it, between certain works of art and certain discoveries.
    I’m almost sure that it is the works of art that came first. Corot, van Gogh, Gauguin, then the Impressionists … The Impressionists most of all, who placed man in a new context. The real (I mean what up to then passed for real) is closely mixed with what yesterday was still unreal.
    Didn’t Dostoevsky precede Freud? Freud himself said he had read him and one may wonder if, without the Russian writer, he would have created his new image of man.
    If that’s the way it is, I’m behind the times. Abstract art would itself be a sort of precursor and it is a fact that it confirms scientific theories that are coming to light. Now,
outside of a few exceptions (why?) abstract painting irritates me or leaves me cold. So I shall only be able, like so many others, to go a little way down that road. And, if it’s the rule, a man living in two hundred years, according to my hypothesis of yesterday, would teach us nothing since he would stop after having accompanied human evolution on his own bit of the way.
    I say evolution. I never dare pronounce the word ‘progress’, for the same reason that I mistrust the word ‘happiness’ and its opposite. It seems to me that in the end everything is compensatory.
    Is a middle-class American who earns four hundred dollars a month happier than the peasant of the Middle Ages? With the monthly bills to meet, the necessity of buying what advertising imposes on him, is he any less a slave?
    Another embryo idea too, which is funny, or rather which places me among the laymen, the dilettantes who adventure into forbidden territory. Four or five years at the university, a few books – which are, after all, within anyone’s reach – a few courses which are only lectures, without contact, most often, between the professor and the student, several hasty visits, for future doctors, to hospital rooms, are enough to establish a barrier that none can breach without being ridiculed.
    Too bad! I won’t pay attention to it, at least in these notebooks. And what does it matter if someone says later that I was riding my hobbyhorse? Is it any better to play cards or with an iron-ended stick and a hard little white ball, as in golf?
    Bacteriology, and especially virology, fascinate me. Even here, to be taken seriously (?), I would have to look at one of the books I’ve made notes in, cite names, references. I don’t want to clutter up my mind or my memory with what I know is at my disposal in my library.
    Well then, I have the impression that there is a tendency (oh, barely perceptible!) towards the simplification of diseases, or, more exactly, that some researchers are more or less consciously moving towards a unity of disease.
    The Greeks (it was not Hippocrates but, if I’m not mistaken, his successors) have already said that there are no diseases but only