René Martin-Guelliot to Jean Paulhan, 1912, 5

Saturday (around the end of May? 1912)

My dear friend,

I was still waiting, thinking I could tell you the meeting, but I was extremely busy this weekend: opening of exhibitions, funerals, etc. Will you come on Monday? Then we will [shelter] for 2 or 3 days. But I [think] I will be calm the week June 8-15.
Don't have any qualms about Monday's conversation. It's likely that what you say about "taxation" is correct. It is precisely a disadvantage of my position being too central to the Spectator that I risk creating too much confusion or solidarity between the postulates of the Spectator and some of my particular ideas. There is solidarity but not equivalence. The idea that I am thinking of is the following: the illusion that I am dealing with, that which consists of seeing an opposition in globo before worrying if there are no partial misunderstandings (which is in my opinion quite frequent, but that is a secondary point) has the result not of fertilizing the discussion (as you perhaps believe, differing in that from me) but either 1° of [cutting] it off sharply by the themes: tastes and colors... or note that I see nothing wrong with it etc. Or 2° to apparently feed it, but falsely, the question remaining poorly posed. I continually have the impression when I discuss this way or attend a discussion, that in the absence of a preliminary remark on the position of the question, the method, the conversation is reduced to a banality analogous to that of a conversation between strangers, strangers in the worldly sense who know nothing about each other, or strangers in the linguistic sense who must constantly wonder about the meaning of the words... there we don't even question ourselves. Calm down, I am not for the abolition of discussion, but for its policing, a bit like the traffic police in big cities which, by rectifying it locally, allows it to have a greater scope - and moreover in no way addresses its cause but the relationships created by it.
In other words, I emphasize the small aspects of the discussions, not because I consider them important, but because I think they mask the really interesting ones.
We will talk about this better orally,

Yours sincerely,
R.M.G.