Letters to Jean Guéhenno

September 6, 1937
Sometimes I blame you for remembering so much. I say to myself: a bourgeois who becomes a worker, and who never stops remembering that he was once a bourgeois, how could we forgive him? Then I let myself be taken back. Would I annoy you if I told you that there is indeed charm, that there is a terribly captivating charm in what you write – that perhaps you are not completely unaware of it? That this charm is undoubtedly proof that there is at least one plane where you are without memory... and besides the comparison with the bourgeois who becomes a worker is not entirely fair.

Jean Paulhan-Jean Guéhenno, Correspondence 1926-1968, Gallimard, 2002,

December 3, 1958
Understand what bothers me a little in your optimism: it is on the one hand obviously that we have both “succeeded” (as they say horribly): your father, the shoemaker, my grandfather the little grocer, would be amazed to see the bourgeois (and even the great bourgeois) that we have become. So optimism would be natural to us.
Yet remember on the other hand that if the worker, the peasant, the modern man is fairly well protected against toothache, he is hardly protected against mass travel; if it is protected (to a certain extent) against tuberculosis, it is not at all protected against slavery, extermination, the atomic bomb, carpet bombing. As we have clearly seen. So, before declaring myself satisfied, I ask for some reflection. Or rather I guess we all lost out. […] …That we have all lost in the process – and therefore that there was at the base some error, some false point of view.

Ibid.