Letter to Barbara Church
Jean PaulhanBarbara ChurchChristmas 35
Very dear friend, you have, I think, like all sensible and yet delicate people, the feeling that for nothing in the world it would be possible for you to start again the year which is about to end, if it were to be exactly the same. I will tell you the reason which you do not know.
It is that you have discovered so many things over the past year that for nothing in the world would you want to have forgotten them for an instant.
If we were wise, we should hold a meeting around Christmas where everyone would share their discoveries of the year. It is certain that we have not stopped winning, since the first day we chose to live. (It is not at birth, but later the day when little girls take on a simple and somber look.) We would see it better that day. We would be moved and joyful, we would kiss.
You are so far away that this project is hardly practical.
At least I'll tell you what I found. And it may well be that we have, as long as we are alive, only one thing to discover; but as soon as it is discovered, it is no longer entirely possible to say it: we must hurry to speak, while we are still in the approaches, and the biases (if it is a question, as is probable, of what presses us and surrounds us on all sides, and in which we bathe, without ever discovering the inclination, the inclination of the head, which would make us see it in the face.)
I no longer remember which Austrian scholar showed that we speak to each other in dreams a coded language where the balcony (among other things) means the breasts; nor what linguistics, in broad daylight a language of allusions where the same word (for example) which designates in each language the lizard or the mouse is also the one which means the muscle, or the arm. This is where we are surprised to find that we have confused the running of a lizard with the twitching of a muscle, and the rest.
Think, however, of this other feature of language, much more constant still: it is given to each word to designate, as we wish, a thing in the world as well as a thought or a simple word. So can I tell you that here is the New Year returned with the same place of the sun and the stars (that's the thing) or that I wish you, from this New Year (that's the thought) all the good and happiness possible; or even that this is not the way of speaking (yet it is also one).
It is therefore that we have formed, and that we also know how to form at any moment – certainly, without ever seeing it – a thought for which the world and things and our mind and language itself are only one, a thought beyond reach and it would finally be improbable (and more singular a thousand times than it is) if it were not true, and that it could one day disappear, or change. (But I'll leave the rest to you to imagine). Happy New Year, dear friend. I think that a wish, which touches so closely on this kind of thinking, will be effective for well over a year. See you soon.
Jean Paulhan