But one day, in a careless moment, your own heart will be revealed to itself, as though you had turned a corner and collided with a creditor you had sought to avoid. You behold yourself and perceive your vain evasions in this prison without walls, doors or bars – this prison that is your life.

You can never be vigilant enough. Some are better at pretending than others. Some keep it up for years, others for just a few hours! It ends for all in an inevitable reversion to sadness, like returning to the earth.

For some reason, after so many years, last night I was remembering my grandfather on my mother’s side. I see him at his work-table, among thousands of springs, screws, cogs, and the faces and hands of watches. I see him leaning over them, a watchmaker’s monocle clamped as always in the socket of his right eye, an exacting master casting spells with his long-fingered hands over the world of mechanical wonders he ruled, putting it in motion.

On that monstrous table, which as a child I was forbidden to go near (a missing cog meant the onset of chaos), he organized tiny autonomous worlds, tiny abstract entities from those minuscule dots of metal, which came together as a precise, strict, ordered harmony of hundreds of rhythmic voices in fine, ticking music. Under the glass of every watch-face lay a planet with its own discrete life, indifferent to what went on beyond it, and the glass seemed specially made to separate it from that ‘beyond’.

Though I sensed he was restless, the old man was truly enviable for the peace he enjoyed among the metal beings his hand created. He lived under their spell for hours, days, years. Yet his craft was surely also an escape, a refuge. And perhaps he ran from himself, and was in terror that he would never encounter his true self.

And so, in the evening, when darkness fell and he had risen suddenly from the workbench over which he had sat silently all day, there was no pause, no restful smile on the face that gentle man. He was always hurrying. Why was he hurrying? Where was he hurrying to?

He would get his hat and coat and walking stick, say something in passing and hurry into the street, leaving the door open, and to the synagogue across the road. There he would rush about with the same harried air, shaking hands here and there, and finally come to a stop before his prayer stand. There he would recover his composure, leaning over an open book, as tensed and silent as he was before the tiny wheels of a clock. Many times I watched him there, reading. He seemed immersed in confecting more tiny mechanisms, and the letters in the book – terribly small – looked like more tiny parts to be organized by his eye, to be called forth from nothingness, from stillness. At home were clocks, here were ideas, and both were abstract, cold and exact, subject to the will of a man trying to forget himself. Did he succeed? I don’t know. His face was at times illuminated from beyond, in expectation of what – or despairing of what – I am unable to say.

At least sixty years of life and twenty of death separate us. Even more – many more. He lived in the Middle Ages and I live today. We are separated by centuries. I don’t read the books he read or believe the things he believed in, I am surrounded by different people and have other preoccupations. And yet today I feel I am his grandson, his direct descendant, heir to his incurable melancholy.

*

Why do we, who rebel against ourselves so often, for so many reasons, never revolt against our taste for catastrophe, against our kinship with pain?

There is an eternal amity between us and the fact of suffering, and more than once, in my most lamentable moments, I have been surprised to recognize the mark of pride in this suffering, the indulging of a vague vanity. There is perhaps something tragic in this, but to the same degree it also shows an inclination for theatricality. Indeed, in the very hour when I am deeply sad I sense, subconsciously, the metaphysical tenor of my soul taking the stage.

Perhaps I’m bad to think this way, but I will never be sufficiently tough with myself, will never strike myself hard enough.

*

I would criticize anti-Semitism above all, were it to permit me to judge it, for its lack of imagination: ‘freemasonry, usury, ritual killing’.

Is that all? How paltry!

The most basic Jewish conscience, the most commonplace Jewish intelligence, will find within itself much graver sins, an immeasurably deeper darkness, incomparably more shattering catastrophes.

All they have to use against us are stones, and sometimes guns. In our eternal struggle with ourselves, we have a subtle, slow-working but irremediable vitriol in our own hearts.

I can well understand why a renegade Jew is more ferocious than any other kind of renegade. The harder he tries to shake his shadow, the tighter it sticks. Even in disowning his race, the very fact of his apostasy is a Judaic act, as we all, inwardly, renounce ourselves a thousand times, yet always go back home, with the wilfulness of one who desires to be God himself.

*

I’m certainly not a believer and the matter doesn’t concern me, doesn’t really trouble me.

I don’t attempt to be rigorous in this regard and acknowledge quite frankly the inconsistencies. I can know, or say, that God does not exist, and recall with pleasure the physics and chemistry textbooks from school that gave him no place in the Universe. That doesn’t prevent me from praying when I receive bad news or wish to avert it. It’s a familiar God, to whom I offer up sacrifices from time to time, under a cult of rules established by me and – I believe – corroborated by him. I suggest typhus for myself, instead of a flu He was thinking of sending to somebody dear to me.