my relations with them lasted a shorter time than relations with my friends. In every friend I am looking for a brother. I have not found a friend in my brother, but I have not, alas, made the effort to look. My brother was too old for us to be friends. My brother and I are like night and day, and I may be the night. I have often thought that education had little influence over individuals, since my brother and I had the same education and have pursued divergent paths. I like my brother, this is probably reciprocal, I write “probably” because we have never discussed it. It moves me to see photos of my brother when he was little, I see that we have the same complexion, the same eyes, the same hair, but I know these similar envelopes contain minds that have never come into contact. At night it reassures me to hear a few quiet footfalls on the floor of the apartment above. I do not eat candy, it makes me sick. In a foreign city, I always feel an urge to visit the zoo, even though a foreign zoo is no more exotic than a French one. I start by looking up some precise information in a biographical dictionary, then I spend a much longer time flipping around. I prefer, in order, flipping around in an encyclopedia, a biographical dictionary, a normal dictionary, a French-English dictionary, a French-Spanish dictionary, a French-Latin dictionary. I sometimes flip around in a phone book for no special reason. I read synopses of movies in the paper without any intention of seeing them. I do not read the TV guide, I watch at random and find out what’s on by channel-surfing. I watch movies on TV without planning to, so I rarely see one all the way through. I do not believe in the cinema of fiction, only four movies have made a deep impression on me, Life Upside Down , directed by Alain Jessua, The Devil, Probably , by Robert Bresson, and The Mother and the Whore and Une sale histoire , by Jean Eustache, certain other movies have distracted or moved me, but I don’t give them the credit. I live with a feeling of permanent failure, although I don’t fail especially often at things I try to do. I do not use an umbrella. I take little pleasure in success, failure leaves me cold, but it infuriates me never to have tried, when I could have. I go to the movies not to learn, but for distraction. I don’t think movies are stupid, I just don’t expect much from them. I believe more in literature, even minor literature, than in movies, even great ones. I don’t have time to tell long stories. It takes me a while to realize that certain people bore me, such as people who are witty but tell stories slowly, with lots of useless details, at first I admire the precision of their memories, then I get tired, and finally I can’t stand to wait fifteen minutes to find out the upshot of a story that should have taken one minute to tell. I went to Bordeaux for the first time when I was twenty-five, I found when I went back at the age of thirty-eight that I remembered nothing: not a street, not a museum, not a café, not a river, nothing. There are periods when I remember everything, and others when my memory fails me, I don’t remember things I know perfectly well, I can’t think of the name of the place Vendôme or the title of a novel by Stendhal. I think the big toe is doomed to disappear. I feel uneasy in a tall chair, I need low seats in order to sit up straight without making an effort. I feel better sitting in a hard chair than in a soft chair. I do not keep my clothes in a wardrobe but on open shelves so I can take them in at one glance. Twice in my life I have been courted by gay men, they knew I wasn’t gay, I did not give them satisfaction. I have never been attracted to a man, which is a shame, the gay life appeals to me. As far as I know, I have no children. I got one woman pregnant, we decided that she would have an abortion, this was painful for her, as it was for me, she told me it was worse for her, meaning I would never
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