The first brother I encountered was the big strapping fellow with the innocent blue eyes. He greeted me with a cruel smile that was like cold water in my face. I saw at once the childishness of my inventions and the baseness of the role I was expected to play. Breaking all the rules, I went to find the Superior and told him that I could no longer agree ‘to play the devil.’ He spoke to me with a gentle severity, perhaps sincere, perhaps professional. ‘My son,’ he concluded, I see that you possess an incurable need to understand which prevents you from staying in this house. We shall pray to God that He wishes to call you to Him by other paths. …’

“That evening I took the train for Paris. I had entered the monastery under the name of Brother Petrus. I left it with the sobriquet Father Sogol. I have kept this nickname. My religious companions had called me this because of a turn of mind they had noticed in me, which at the slightest prompting made me take exactly the opposite position to all proposed assertions, always invert cause and effect, principal and consequence, substance and chance. ‘Sogol’ is a rather childish and pretentious anagram, but I needed a name that sounded good; and it reminded me of a rule of thought that had served me well. Thanks to my scientific and technical knowledge, I soon found jobs in various laboratories and industrial enterprises. Gradually I readapted to the life of the ‘century,’ but only externally, it’s true. Deep down I can’t manage to become attached to this monkey-cage frenzy which people so dramatically call life.”

A bell rang.

“Fine, my good Physics, fine!” cried Father Sogol to his servant/ housekeeper; and he explained to me: “Lunch is ready. Let’s go then.”

He led me off the path and, gesturing to all the contemporary human knowledge inscribed on the little rectangles before our eyes, he said, in a low voice:

“Bogus, all this, bogus. There is not a single one of these cards of which I can say: here is a truth, a small, sure, and certain truth. There are only mysteries or mistakes in all this; where the first end, the second begin.”

We came to a small, totally white room where the table was set.

“Here, at least, something relatively real, if one can bring these two words together without setting off an explosion,” he went on as we sat down facing each other across one of those country dishes in which all the seasonal vegetables weave their vapors around a piece of boiled animal. “Again my good Physics calls upon all her old Breton shrewdness to put on my table the elements of a meal that contains no barium sulfate, no gelatin, no boric acid, no sulfuric acid, no formaldehyde, or any of the other drugs used in contemporary industrial food production. A good pot-au-feu, after all, is worth more than a mendacious philosophy.”

We ate in silence. My host did not feel obliged to chat while eating, and I greatly admired him for that. He had no fear of being silent when he had nothing to say, or of reflecting before speaking. In reporting our conversation now, I fear I have given the impression that he never stopped talking. In reality, his stories and his confidences were interspersed with long silences, and quite often I put in a word myself. I told him, in broad outline, about my life, but that is hardly worth repeating here; and as for the silences, how can silence be described in words? Only poetry can do that.

After the meal, we returned to the “park,” under the large window, and we stretched out on carpets and leather cushions. This was a very simple way of making a low-ceilinged area more spacious. Physics silently brought the coffee, and Sogol resumed his remarks:

“That fills the stomach, but little else. With a bit of money in this prevailing civilization, one manages well enough to obtain the basic physical satisfactions. The rest is bogus. Bogus, ticks and tricks, that’s our whole life, between the diaphragm and the cranium.