I AM writing a history of yesterday, not because yesterday was in any way remarkable, or could even be called remarkable, but because I have long desired to tell the story of the intimate side of a single day. God alone knows how many varied and interesting impressions, and thoughts aroused by those impressions (obscure and ill-defined but nonetheless intelligible to our own soul) occur in the course of a single day. If it were possible to recount them in such a way as to make it easy for me to read my own self, and for others to read me as I really am, the result would be a really instructive and absorbing book – a book indeed for which the world could not provide enough ink for the writing, or printers for the publishing of it.
Yesterday I got up late, at a quarter to ten, and that was simply because I had gone to bed after midnight the night before. (I long ago set myself the rule of not going to bed later than twelve o’clock, but all the same I find myself doing so some three times each week); however there are certain circumstances in which I would class this not as a crime but rather as a minor lapse: such circumstances are of many kinds, and how it was yesterday I shall now explain.
Here I must beg your indulgence for recounting things which occurred the day
I was playing cards, but certainly not from any passionate liking for cards, however it may appear. As regards the love of card-playing, it is rather like the case of those people who dance the polka just because they enjoy the exercise. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among the many suggestions he made which no one agreed with, advocated playing with a cup-and-ball [bilboquet] in society in order to give one’s hands something to do; but that does not go far enough, for in society the head too needs to be occupied, or at least it needs some sort of activity about which people can either talk or remain silent.—In our country such an activity has in fact been devised – card-playing.—Persons born in the last century complain that ‘there is no conversation whatever to be had nowadays’. I do not know what people were like in the last century (it seems to me, though, that they have always been pretty much the same); however, genuine conversation is never a real possibility. Conversation merely as a pastime is the stupidest of inventions. It is not because of intellectual inadequacy that there is no conversation, but because of egoism. Everyone wants to speak about himself or about what concerns him; and if one person talks and the other listens, that is not conversation, but lecturing. And even if two people agree to concentrate on the same topic, it only takes the addition of a third person for the whole thing to be ruined: he intervenes, they must do their best to accommodate him, and the conversation goes to the devil.
There are also conversations where two people are interested in the same thing and nobody interferes with them, yet here the situation is even worse. Each of them talks about the same thing, but from his own point of view, measuring everything by his own yardstick, and the longer the conversation goes on, the farther each of them gets from the other, until each realizes that he has ceased to converse, but is preaching with a freedom no one else could equal, setting himself up as an example, and the other person is not really listening, but doing likewise. Have you ever engaged in rolling Easter eggs during Holy Week? You set in motion two identical hard-boiled eggs along the same strip of bast matting, but each egg has in fact a slight irregularity in its side. They may start rolling in the same direction, but then each egg begins to roll in a direction dictated by its own tiny irregularity. In conversation, as in egg-rolling, there are the
I am not referring to those conversations which occur because it would be improper not to say something, in the same way that it would be improper not to wear a necktie. One party is thinking: ‘You realize of course that it is no matter to me what I talk about, but I have to do so’; and the other is thinking: ‘Talk on, talk on, you poor fellow, – I accept that it is necessary.’ This is not conversation, but rather – like black tail-coats, visiting cards and gloves – a matter of propriety.
