Casa tomada

The classic story ("House taken") by this Argentine author.  You can read the original here.

1

We liked the house because apart from being spacious and old (today old houses succumb to the most advantageous liquidation of their property) it held the memories of our great-grandparents, our paternal grandfather, our forefathers and all our infancy.

We were accustomed, Irene and I, to living alone in the house, which was madness since eight people could have lived in it without getting in each other’s way.  We would do the cleaning in the morning, getting up at seven, and then from eleven onwards I would let Irene inspect the last few rooms while I made my way to the kitchen.  We would lunch at noon, always punctually; there no longer remained anything more to do than a few dirty dishes.  It was so pleasant to eat lunch and think of the house in its profundity and silence, and how we would do enough to keep it clean.  Sometimes we would come to believe that it was the house that did not allow us to get married.  Irene spurned two suitors without any substantial reason, and Maria Esther died on me before we managed to get engaged.  We entered our forties with the unexpressed idea that our simple and silent marriage of siblings was a necessary closing ceremony to the genealogy carefully placed in this house by our great-grandparents.  One day we would die there, idle and elusive cousins would be left with the house and raze it to batten themselves on the land and the bricks; or, better, we ourselves would knock it down justly and fairly before it was too late.

Irene was a girl born to bother no one.  Apart from her matitudinal activity she spent the rest of the day knitting on the sofa of her bedroom.  I don’t know why she knitted so much; I think that women knit once they have found in this work a grand pretext for not doing anything at all. Irene was not like that, however, she always knitted things we needed: cardigans for the winter, socks for me, shawls and vests for herself.  Sometimes she would knit a vest and then undo it in a quick moment because it wasn’t to her liking.  It was funny to see the mountain of wool curled up in the little basket, resistant to its loss of form for another few hours.  On Saturday I would go to the center of town to buy wool.  Irene trusted my tastes and was happy with the colors I brought back, and I never had to return any wool with hanks.  I took advantage of these outings to poke around some bookstores and ask, in vain, whether there were any new French arrivals.  Since 1939 nothing of any value had arrived in Argentina.

But I’m interested in talking about the house, about the house and about Irene, because I am of no importance.  I ask myself what Irene would have done without her knitting.  One can reread a book, but once a pullover is done you can’t redo it without a huge scandal.  One day I found the bottom drawer of our camphor chest of drawers filled with shawls, white, green and purple shawls.  There they sat surrounded by mothballs, piled up like some haberdashery display.  It wasn’t worth asking Irene what she planned to do with them.  We were not obliged to make a living; every month the silver from the fields came and our funds increased.  But the only thing that kept Irene entertained was her knitting, which was a marvelous way for her to decompress, while for me as the hours passed, her hands seemed like silver hedgehogs, her needles coming and going, and one or two little baskets on the floor where the balls of yarn were in constant agitation.  It was beautiful. 

2

How could I have forgotten the layout of the house?  The dining room, a room with Gobelins, the library and three large bedrooms were located in backmost part of the house, the part which overlooked Rodríguez Peña.  Only a corridor with a solid oak door isolated this part of the front wing in which there was a bathroom, the kitchen, our bedrooms, and the main living room, which communicated to the bedrooms and hallway.  You entered the house through a hallway in majolica, and the interior door gave out to the living room.  This was set up in such a way that entering through the hallway, you would open the interior door and move on into the living room; on the sides were the doors to our bedrooms, and at the front was the hallway which led to the part all the way in the back; advancing through the hallway you would cross the oak door and farther over there would begin the other side of the house, or you could also simply go to the left right up to the door and then follow a narrower passageway which would lead to the kitchen and bathroom.  Whenever the door was open you noticed that the house was large; when it wasn’t open, you had the impression of one of the apartments being built today, hardly any space for moving about.  Irene and I always lived in this part of the house; we almost never went beyond the oak door apart from cleaning, and it is amazing how much earth the furniture takes up.  Buenos Aires might be a clean city but this is owing to its residents and not to anything else.  There was too much earth in the air, a gust of wind hardly blew, and the dust could be felt on the marble of the consoles and between the diamonds in the macramé carpets.  Quite a bit of work to get that off with a feather duster as it flies and stays suspended in air, a moment before it alights again onto the furniture and the pianos. 

3

There is one thing I will always remember with intense clarity because it was simple and happened not within a useless context.  Irene was knitting in her bedroom; it was eight o’clock at night and it suddenly occurred to me to light the fire under the kettle for mate.  I went through the hallway until I came up to the half-open oak door and then was walking to the corner which led to the kitchen when I heard something in the dining room or the library.  The sound was imprecise and muffled as if a chair had been knocked over onto a carpet or a drowned whisper of conversation.  I also heard it, at the same time or a second later, at the back of the hallway which had several rooms up to the door.  I pulled myself against the door before it was too late, closing it as I slammed my body into it.  Luckily the key was on our side of the lock and I lowered the large bolt for additional security.

I went to the kitchen and heated up the kettle.  And when I returned with the tray of mate, I said to Irene:

“I had to close the door to the hallway. They’ve taken the back.”

She let her knitting drop and looked at me with her sad, tired eyes.

“Are you sure?”

I said I was.

“Then,” she said, retrieving her needles, “we’ll have to live on this side.”

I primed the mate very carefully, but she delayed a while before resuming her work.  I remember that she was knitting a grey vest; I liked that vest. 

4

Those first days seemed awful to both of us.  We had each left many beloved things in the part of the house that was taken.  My French books, for example, were all in the library.  Irene missed some carpets and a pair of slippers which kept her so warm throughout the winter.  I thought of my juniper pipe and I believe that Irene was preoccupied by memories of an old bottle of Hesperidina.  Quite frequently (although this only happened the first few days), we would close some drawer from the chest of drawers and look at one another in utter sadness.

"It's not here."

And there went one more thing lost to the other side of the house.

But we also had some advantages.  Cleaning became much simpler, so that even getting up very late, at nine-thirty for example, we were sitting there idly with our arms crossed before the clock struck eleven.  Irene got accustomed to coming with me to the kitchen and helping me prepare lunch.  I thought it over and then made the decision: while I was preparing lunch Irene would make some cold dishes for us to eat at night.  We were happy because it was always so hard to leave our bedrooms at sundown and get to cooking something.  Now we made do with the table from Irene's bedroom and dishes of cold cuts.

Irene was happy since this left her more time to knit;  I was a little lost because of my books.  But I didn't inflict my hurt on my sister and started to review our father's stamp collection, which helped me kill the time.  We had a lot of fun, each one doing his own thing, almost always reconvening in Irene's bedroom, the more comfortable of the two.  Sometimes Irene would say:

"Look at this point right here, it just occurred to me.  Doesn't it look like a drawing of a clover?"

A while later it was I who showed her a piece of paper so that she could see the value of an Eupen or Malmédy seal.  We were doing alright, and little by little we started not to think about anything.  One can live without thinking. 

5

(When Irene would call out in a loud voice I would wake up immediately.  Nothing could possibly accustom me to this strange voice, like that of a statue or parrot, a voice that came from the world of dreams not her throat.  Irene would say that my dreams consisted of big starts and shakes which would sometimes throw off the cover.  Our bedrooms were separated by the living room, but at night we could hear anything from anywhere in the house.  We could hear breathing, coughing; we sensed in advance the dawn which led to the key on the night stand and our mutual and frequent insomnia.

Apart from this, everything in the house was quiet.   During the day there were domestic murmurs, the metallic friction of the knitting needles, the creaking of the pages of the stamp album.  I believe I mentioned that the oak door was solid.  In the kitchen and bathroom, which were adjacent the taken part, we began to talk very loudly and Irene sang some nursery rhymes.  There was too much noise from the china and glassware in the kitchen for other noises to interrupt them.  Very rarely we permitted silence there, because once we came back  to the bedrooms and the living room the house became silent and half-lit until we stepped more slowly so as not to cause ourselves any difficulty.  I think that this was why whenever Irene would call out in a loud voice I would  wake up immediately.) 

6

Now I'm almost repeating the same thing without mentioning the consequences.  I get thirsty at night, and before going to bed I told this to Irene, who then proceeded to the kitchen to get me a glass of water.  From the door of the bedroom (she was knitting) I heard noise in the kitchen; perhaps in the kitchen or in the bathroom because at the corner of the hallway the sound went out.  My brusque manner of stopping caught Irene's attention and she came to me without saying a word.  We stayed there listening to the noises, clearly perceiving that they were from this side of the oak door, in the kitchen and in the bathroom, or in the same hallway where the corner began, almost on our side.

We didn't even exchange glances.  I pressed Irene's arm and made her run with me up to the interior door without turning back.  The noises behind us could be heard more strongly now but were still muffled.  I slammed the door shut and we stood there in the hallway.  Now nothing could be heard any more.

"They've taken this part," said Irene.  Her knitting had fallen from her hands and the threads went up to the door and got lost underneath.  Once she saw that the balls of yarn were on the other side, she dropped her knitting without so much as looking down.

"Did you take the time to bring something with you?"  was my futile question.

"No, nothing," she said.

We were left with nothing but the clothes we had on.  I remembered the fifteen thousand pesos I had stashed in the wardrobe of my bedroom.  But it was already too late.

Since I still had my wristwatch, I saw that it was eleven at night.  I threw my arm around Irene's waist (I think she was crying) and we walked out to the street.  Before moving away from it all, I felt sorry and closed the front door well, then I threw the key into the sewer.  No need for some poor devil to think of breaking in and staying in the house, at this hour of the night and with the house taken.   

Strange Days

Apocalyptic soothsayers share one logistical difficulty: if the world really were to end at a predetermined moment, in what time zone would the chaos commence?  Perhaps a hundred years ago few Westerners would have hesitated to say Greenwich Mean time; the way the world has since changed makes New York and Washington clocks much more plausible harbingers of doom.  The movie industry, however, will continue to be based for the foreseeable future – and you know how far that type of phrasing goes – in Los Angeles, California, site of enviable lifestyles and unenviable discord.  Discord over what, precisely?  Oh, the usual drivel – racial inequality, political hypocrisy, rumored Gestapo-like organizations, virtual reality devices trafficked through a burgeoning black market.  How could the world end so untidily?  That question and a few others are posed in this film. 

It is likely that every single description of the film begins with the ominous date December 30, 1999, which is and isn't the end of the last millennium – but we'll save our hair-splitting for other issues.  Strictly speaking, if the world were to combust and the antichrist surface or however you imagine an end of days at the turn of the millennium, all the cast members of Strange Days would have to wait another fifty-two and a half weeks.  Rudely disappointing, true enough, but who said we were adhering to flimsy tools such as calendars?  In any case, the film's initial conceit is that the end will come first and perhaps only to Los Angeles so that we don't even bother about the rest of the universe.  We begin, therefore, with the adrenalin rush that will usher in a new form of virtual reality, and the opening scene of a robbery of a Chinese restaurant and subsequent pratfall off a roof lets us know something very creepy: someone is selling people's memories.  The contraption employed is a superconducting quantum interference device – which resembles both a coral fragment and a crown of thorns – and the science should not be dismissed as the habitual futuristic mumbo-jumbo.  SQUIDs actually exist, although they are not quite used in the way Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) earns a living. 

A former cop and current slimebucket, Nero appears to be the most powerful dealer of the most powerful drug the world has ever known – virtual reality, with the generic name of "playback."  His competition, if he has any, is never revealed.  The only other source of the wonder drug is an oddball associate named Tick (Richard Edson), who provides him with his raw materials, tapes culled from both living and non-living persons with no questions asked by either Nero or Tick as to how these recordings came into being.  So while we can debate whether it is more disturbing that the criminal in the opening scene is wearing a SQUID or whether someone would not hesitate to sell a dead man's memories, the real discussion becomes how to use the device for purposes other than getting high.  The obvious answer, of course, is surveillance, and Nero is fully aware of this potential.  Yet the fact that an impecunious former police officer in a crime-ridden megalopolis would not dare sell his goods to the organization that could most benefit from them is either a plot oversight or a tribute to Nero's demolished reputation.  The third explanation, that of the LAPD's taking the moral high road, is belied by the rampant brutality throughout the film, most notably involving the unsolved shooting of famous rap star Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer).    

Appropriately enough, about ninety-five percent of the film takes place with Nero present.  That is to say, whether we like it or not, Nero is our SQUID.  And while Nero couldn't care less about a politicized hoodlum like Jeriko One, he most certainly does give a damn about the latter's manager and producer Philo Gant (Michael Wincott).  Gant exudes the filth and decadence that have always caused civilizations to collapse; even a cigarette proves impossible for him to master without a sinister stoop and grimace.  Gant's wealth, which permits him to reside in a hollow urban palace that recalls an abandoned Roman sanctuary, and his promises of fame to young recording artists make him a magnet for girls such as Faith (Juliette Lewis).  Why Gant would bother for more than a couple of nights with a floozy like Faith is perhaps less mysterious than Nero's enduring love for a woman whom he could not possibly keep.  And why Lewis is cast in such a role is not ours to know: we are exposed to all but four or five inches of her and it is not a pretty sight.  Having as our primary romantic tragedy someone of her constitution mesmerizing a witch doctor would only make sense in a world on the brink of ruin.  As we learn early on, Nero's favorite SQUID activity involves the consumption of large amounts of vodka and playback, invariably of his relationship with Faith which ended as abruptly as the realities on his merchandise ("You assume you have a life," says Gant in one of his kinder moments to Nero, "because you traffic in the lives of others").  Later in the film we receive some explanation of his obsession, which I suppose has much to do with his previous line of work as anything else.  Two more characters of importance in Nero's life should be mentioned: Max (Tom Sizemore) and Mace (Angela Bassett), both of whom are rivals and allies.  Mace in particular has had a long past with Nero, and the intensity of her persona is overplayed so much at times as to make her scenes nearly unwatchable (her fitness in comparison to Nero's gigolo flab makes the contrast that much stronger).  Risking life and limb, Nero will attempt again and again to win back Faith – the metaphor is terribly unsubtle – which mostly involves sneaking into a hellish disco called Retinal Fetish and getting pummeled by Gant's henchmen.  Yet the plot will be triggered by another erstwhile hooker, one with large, sad eyes and the appropriate name of Iris (Brigitte Bako).

Iris used to walk the streets for money, but her current wardrobe and demeanor suggest that only the job title has changed.  One night she has the misfortune of witnessing a horrific event that could lead the already unstable city into pandemic riot – and nothing more should be said about the matter.  The plot is not evident for almost a good hour, and when it does begin to unwind we understand the outside world as a projection of Nero's inner turmoil.  Most films would subvert Nero's personal crisis to the growing dangers outside his tiny sphere, but Strange Days follows the conceit to the full extent of its parameters.  What Nero inflicts upon his customers is transformed into the moral downfall of society as a whole, and the consequences of his trade are at once his fault and the natural outgrowth of circumstance.  The music in the film, ostensibly a vital component since all good revolutions need a soundtrack, might make you sentimental for those carefree late teenage years when originality and freedom meant singing along to someone else’s cynical lyrics.  But then again, there have been few things in human history as addictive as music and clothing.  So you might want to pay as much attention to Nero's tie collection as he does.

The End of the Affair (novel)

Film adaptations of famous novels have long endured the spittle of the literary elite; after all, what can be shown on screen that cannot be committed to the faithful papyrus?  However true this statement may be (and it is quite true; rare is the cinematic version that betters its source, as in this film), it is interesting how many readers come away disgusted by the film and how many moviegoers delight in the original text.  I suppose one could argue that no one would read the book who hadn't first admired the film, but there is also another element to consider.  What we do as teenage readers – all of us, no exceptions – namely, impose familiar faces and voices upon the characters on the silent page, lends a story the intimacy we crave in life itself.  The figures need not be, and are most often not, movie stars or unattainable strangers; they are usually our loved ones, the girl we smile shyly at during homeroom, the odd-shaped and wretched gremlins banished to high school classes.  We imbue them with the conversations and thoughts we believe they might have or they ought to entertain, and they step out of the dull bromides of teenage existence to emerge as worldly adults.  This is a sorry habit, but if practiced early enough, a useful one.  This and many other wonts lurk beneath the surface of this acclaimed novel.     

I was prescient enough to append to these pages a brief review of its more recent film version, but, wonderful to say, the two works differ sufficiently as to skirt repetition.  Our year is 1946 and our narrator is Maurice Bendrix, a bitter, slightly lamed writer in his early forties; his age is never specified, although his first work came out twenty years before.  Bendrix's main compulsion will be the five hundred words he completes five days a week, churning out just enough to produce a book a year, including edits and promotion.  What he gains from such a vocation – either monetarily or in terms of artistic satisfaction – is never quite revealed to us.  Bendrix drinks, smokes, strolls about as many writers do sniffing for inspiration from the streets they trust, and eats at his favorite clubs to imbue his day with some faint structure.  We hear not a word about his family or his childhood; they are both probably entombed in his earlier novels.  We learn only from his phrases pleached with disgust for the superstitions of mankind that he has no faith – neither in himself nor in the general sense of the word – and has "never seen any qualities in [himself] for a woman to like."  This self-loathing may be the only thing he has in common with the lovely Sarah Miles.

Sarah is the wife of Henry, a senior civil servant, which just happens to be the subject of Bendrix's latest project.  It occurs to us that this may not be the first time that Bendrix has seduced a woman to obtain a more precise character sketch, and the questions asked over dinner little dissuade us:

What time did Henry have breakfast? I asked her.  Did he go to the office by tube, bus or taxi?  Did he bring his work home at night?  Did he have a briefcase with the royal arms on it?  Our friendship blossomed under my interest: she was so pleased that anyone should take Henry so seriously.  Henry was important, but rather as an elephant was important, from the size of his department; there are some kinds of importance that remain hopelessly damned to unseriousness.

We know, however, that unseriousness will never apply to the plight of Bendrix and Sarah.  Sarah, who has had so many lovers before Bendrix that she makes comments about one stair in her house "that always squeaks"; Sarah, who enchanted Bendrix by evincing a happiness that can be detected "in drunken people, in children, seldom elsewhere."  Henry turns out to be a plodding old bore who has not made love to his wife since – well, and here is where the contradictions abound.  As Bendrix's dormant passions gain the better of him, he begins to weigh each phrase and gesture as if they were encoded manifestations of Sarah's plan of farewell.  At one point we are told that Sarah and Henry might never have consummated their marriage; at another, that Sarah, long since unfaithful in frivolous flashes, stopped being with Henry once her assignations with Bendrix became the lifeblood of her days.  By definition the lover's role cannot be reconciled with jealousy, as that is often exactly the emotion that the adulterer wishes to escape.  But such logic has never impeded Bendrix, a solitary lout who writes with the passion he cannot rightly express.  The affair progresses as do the attacks from the continent, until one June day in the horrendous year of 1944, a bomb obliterates the lovers' sanctuary, leaving our novelist under a pile of rubble and his coy mistress pleading to powers she may not understand for something she could not have possibly wished.

For all its precision and understatement, The End of the Affair may challenge the tether of your annoyance in two aspects.  Portions of Sarah's diary are impounded and interset against Bendrix's neat, prim prose, with the obvious aim of providing an unyielding contrast.  While these sections are too large and, indeed, too vital to be skimmed, they provide an unpleasant speed bump on the smooth, slick road of the narrative.  Bendrix only adverts to entries between their final weeks together in 1944 and the present, and it is suggested by Parkis, the private eye hired to follow her, that Sarah was not particularly disciplined in keeping her journal up to date.  The other matter pertains to the bounteous references to the Creator, who must really be considered the third party in the relationship, Henry as estranged as the umbrellaed spectator at a distance from the couple in the legendary movie poster (this could well be Parkis, if unlikely).  Readers of these pages will not doubt my views of the subject; but the obsession of faith has been portrayed with far more tact and restraint.  Yet that is not to say that Sarah's convictions about what this life could possibly mean – which form, after all, the basis of Bendrix's faith in her – are not crucial; they most certainly are.  Sarah will experience what is commonly dubbed a crisis of faith, although such a title implies that faith topples into the ugly costiveness of agnosticism, when fairly the opposite occurs.  Sarah's doubts decuple as do Bendrix's, but the difference lies in what they doubt.  Bendrix doubts Sarah, doubts her glance, her body, her lips; while Sarah doubts everything except Bendrix.  There is also the perhaps apocryphal tale spun by Sarah's mother when she finally meets Bendrix about a summer long ago in France that seems to speak of destiny, or at least of a circle closed.  But then again, why would he believe anything that he couldn't see with his own two, narrowed jaded eyes?  Perhaps because henceforth in every book he will ever read or write, he will only see one face.    

Bergson, "On the Pragmatism of William James" (part 2)

The conclusion to an essay by this French philosopher.  The original can be found in this collection.

What kind of judgment is then true?  We call true a statement that agrees with reality.  But of what does this agreement consist?   Here we would like to see something akin to the resemblance of a portrait and its model: a true statement would be one that copied reality.  Nevertheless, let us consider the question: we will see that only in rare and exceptional cases does this definition of the true become applicable.  What is real is this or that specific fact reaching such and such a point in place and time, that is the singular and changing thing.  On the contrary, most of our statements are general and imply a certain stability in their objects.  Let us take a reality as close as possible to experience, something such as "heat distends bodies."  Of what could this possibly be a copy? 

It is possible, in a certain sense, to copy the distension of a specific body in specific movements by photographing it in different phases.  Metaphorically I could even say that the statement "this iron bar is distended" is the copy of what occurs when I observe the distension of an iron bar.  But a truth that applies to all bodies without involving in particular any one of those I have seen copies and reproduces nothing.  We would like nonetheless to have it copy something and philosophy has always attempted to satisfy our desires in this regard.  For the philosophers of antiquity, there was beyond time and space a world where all possible truths had lain for eternity.  Human statements were for them all the more truthful because they faithfully copied eternal truths.  Modern thought has made truth tumble from the sky to the earth; yet even modern thinkers saw something there which antedated our statements.  Truth might lie in things and facts: science would go look for it, lure it out of its hiding place, and bring it all to light.  A statement such as "heat distends bodies" would then be a law which governed facts, which reigned, if not above them, then at least amongst them, a law truly contained in our experience in whose extraction we are limited.  Even a philosophy like Kant's that claims all scientific truth is relative to the human mind considers true statements as givens a priori in human experience.  Once this experience has been organized in general by human thought, the work of science would consist exclusively of piercing the tough carapace of facts whose truth is lodged within, like a nut in its shell.

This concept of truth is natural to our minds and natural as well to philosophy because it is natural to think of truth as a perfectly coherent and systematized whole within a framework of logic.  This framework would be truth itself; all science has to do is find it.  But pure and simple experience tells us nothing of the sort, and James sticks to experience.  Experience presents us with a flow of phenomena: if this or that statement related to one of these phenomena allows us to master those which come after or even simply to predict them, we say that this statement is true.  A proposition such as "heat distends bodies," a proposition suggested by viewing the distension of a specific body, acts in such a way that we can predict how other bodies may react in the presence of heat.  It helps us to move from an old experience to new ones; it is the conduit, nothing more.  Reality flows and we flow with it; and we call true any statement which, in directing us across moving reality, allows us to grasp hold of it and put ourselves in the best conditions to act.

We can see the difference between this idea and the traditional view of reality.  We normally define the true by the conformity that already exists; James defines it by a relationship that does not exist yet.  The true, according to James, does not copy something that has been or that is, it announces what will be; rather, it prepares our action towards what is going to be.  Philosophy has a natural tendency to want to examine truth retrospectively; James looks it prospectively.

To be more exact, other doctrines make truth into something antecedent to the very specific act of man who has formulated this truth for the first time.  He is the first person to see this truth, we may say, but it was waiting for him like America was waiting for Christopher Columbus.  Something hid it from everyone's purview and, so to speak, covered it; it was then he who discovered it.  But James's concept is completely different.  He does not deny that reality is independent, more or less, of what we may say or think of it.  Yet truth that can only attach itself to what we state or affirm of reality would appear to him to be created by our statements or affirmations.  We invent reality to make use of reality, just as we invent mechanical devices to make use of the forces of nature.  It seems to me that we could summarize the essential argument of pragmatism's concept of truth in such a formula: whereas for other doctrines a new truth is a discovery, for pragmatism it is an invention.

It does not follow, however, that truth is arbitrary.  A mechanical invention has no value apart from its practical utility.  In the same way, to be true a statement should increase our influence on things.   It is no less than the creation of a specific creative mind and it did not precede the effort of this mind any more than, for example, the phonograph preceded Edison.  Doubtless the inventor of the phonograph had to study the properties of sound, which comprises a reality.  Yet his invention is then added to this reality as an absolutely new thing which might never have been produced had he never existed.  Thus for a reality to be viable it must have its roots in realities; but these realities are nothing more than the terrain upon which this reality grows, and other flowers would also have grown there if the wind had scattered other grains. 

According to pragmatism, truth is made little by little thanks to individual contributions from a large number of inventors.  Had these inventors never existed, had there been others in their stead, we would have had an entirely different body of truths.  Reality has evidently remained what it is, or close to it; but there could have been other routes we might have taken for the convenience of our movements.  And here we are not only talking about scientific truths.  We cannot construct a sentence, we can no longer even utter a word these days without accepting certain hypotheses which were created by our ancestors and which could have been very different from what they are.  When I say "my pencil just fell under the table," I am certainly not promulgating a fact of experience since what sight and touch show me is simply that my hand is open and that it let go of what it was holding.  A baby strapped to his seat who sees fall the toy he is playing with probably does not conclude that this object continues to exist.  Rather, he does not possess the distinct idea of an "object," that is to say, of something that subsists, invariable and independent, through the diversity and mobility of appearances that take place.  The first person who decided to believe in this invariability and this independence made a hypothesis: it is this hypothesis that we currently adopt every time we use a noun, every time we speak.  Our grammar would have been different, the articulations of our thinking would have been different, if humanity in the course of its evolution had preferred to adopt hypotheses of a different kind.

The structure of our mind is therefore to a great extent our own doing, or at the very least the doing of some among us.  This is, in my opinion, the most important tenet of pragmatism even if it has not been explicitly released.  It is in this way that pragmatism continues from Kantianism.  Kant said that truth depended on the structure of the human mind.  Pragmatism adds, or at the very least implies, that the structure of the human mind is the effect of the free initiative of a specific number of individual minds.

This is again not to say, however, that truth depends on each of us; one might as well believe that each one of us invented the phonograph.  What it means is that, from the diverse types of truth, the one that is the closest to coinciding with its object is not scientific truth, nor the truth of common sense, nor, more generally, the truth of an intellectual order.  All truth is a route traced across reality; yet of all these routes, it is among those on which we could have attained a very different direction if our attention had been oriented in a different sense or if we had aimed at another type of utility.  On the contrary, it is of the sort whose direction is marked by reality itself.  It is of those which correspond, if one can put it thus, to the currents or flows of reality.  Doubtless these routes still depend on us to a certain extent since we are free to resist a current or to follow it.  And even if we follow it, we can inflect our movements in different directions, associated at the same time as we are subject to the force present therein.  It is no less true that these currents are not created by us: they form an integral part of reality.  Pragmatism borders, therefore, on inverting the order in which we are accustomed to placing the diverse types of truth.  Outside of truths that transmit brute sensation, it is the truths of feeling that would extend the deepest roots.  Should we be comfortable in saying that all truth is an invention, I think in order to remain faithful to the thinking of William James we would have to establish between the truths of feeling and scientific truths the same type of difference as, for example, between a sailboat and a steamboat.  They are both human inventions; yet the former has only a slight role in artifice; it assumes the wind's direction and makes visible to the eye the force employed.  In the latter, on the other hand, it is the artificial mechanism that takes up the most space.  It recovers the force that it puts to use and assigns it a direction that we have chosen ourselves.

Thus the definition that James bestows upon truth creates a body with its conception of reality.  Should reality not be this economic and systematic universe which our logic likes to imagine, should it not be sustained by a framework of intellectuality, truth of an intellectual order would then be a human invention which has the effect of utilizing reality rather than introducing us into it.  And if reality does not form a whole, if it is mobile and multiple, made of currents which cross, then the truth born from contact with one of these currents – truth sensed before being conceived – is more capable than truth conceived simply to seize and stockpile reality itself.

It is therefore this theory of reality that we must first attack in our criticism of pragmatism.  We can raise objections against it, and as far as it is concerned, we would make some qualifications.  Yet no one would contest its depth and originality.  Nor would anyone, having closely examined the conception of truth attached to pragmatism, mistake its moral elevation.  It has been said that James's pragmatism is nothing more than a form of skepticism that debases truth and subordinates it to material utility; that discourages and dissuades disinterested scientific research.  Such an interpretation would never occur to those who were to read the work attentively, and it would profoundly surprise those who had the good fortune of knowing the man himself.  No one loved truth with greater ardor; no one sought it with greater passion.  He was motivated by an immense concern, and from science to science, from anatomy and physiology to psychology, from psychology to philosophy, he moved bent over all the large problems, uncaring of the rest, oblivious of himself.  His whole life he observed, he experimented, he meditated.  And as if he had not done enough, he also dreamed, falling into his final sleep; he dreamed of extraordinary experiences and superhuman efforts by which he could continue, until death and beyond, to work with us for the greater good of science and the greater glory of truth.                 

Bergson, "On the Pragmatism of William James" (part 1)

The first part to an essay by this philosopher and man of letters which served as the introduction to the French translation of this book.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

How can one speak about pragmatism after William James?  And what would we be able to say that has not been already said, and said better, in that enthralling and charming book of which we have here such a faithful translation?  We would hesitate to speak at all if James's thoughts were not so often diminished, or altered, or distorted by the interpretations we impute to them.  Surely many ideas that circulate risk interference between the reader and the book, as well as the imposition of an artificial obscurity upon a work that is the epitome of clarity.

We would poorly understand James's pragmatism if we didn't begin by modifying the current notion that we have of reality in general.  We speak of the "world" or the "cosmos," and those words, according to their origin, indicate something simple, more or less well-structured.  We say "universe," and the word makes us think of the possible unification of things.  We could be spiritualists, materialists, pantheists just as easily as we could be indifferent to philosophy and satisfied in the common sense of the word: we always imagine many simple principles through which the set of material and moral things could be explained.

Our intelligence has become enamored with simplicity.  It economizes effort and wishes for nature to be arranged in such a way so as not to draw our attention; to be thought of should require the smallest possible amount of work.  It is present up until that point at which we need elements or principles to reconstruct its indefinite series of objects and events.      

But if, instead of ideally reconstructing things to give our reason supreme satisfaction we were to grasp these things purely and simply based on what experience permits, we would think and express ourselves in a wholly different manner.  Whereas our intelligence, with its habits of economy, imagines effects in strict proportion to their causes, prodigious nature places in the cause much more than required to produce its effect.  Whereas our motto is Only what we need, nature's motto is More than what is needed – too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything.  Reality, in James's view, is redundant and superabundant.  I think that the same relationship has been established between this reality and the reality reconstructed by philosophers as between the life we live every day and the life that actors portray every evening on the stage.  In the theater, every person does not say what he needs to say nor does what he needs to do; scenes have clear divisions – each play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and all of this is most parsimoniously distributed with a view to a dénouement that may be happy or tragic.  But, in life, we utter an endless array of useless things, we undertake an endless array of useless acts; there are rarely neat and streamlined situations.  Nothing really happens with such simplicity or as completely or beautifully as we might like.  Scenes encroach upon one another; things never begin or end; there is never an entirely satisfying dénouement or an absolutely decisive act.  All the concomitant effects are therefore ruined.  Such is human life.  And such is also what James undoubtedly thinks of reality in general. 

Certainly, our experience is not incoherent.  At the same time as it presents to us things and facts, it shows us the connections between things and the relationships between facts.  These relationships, according to James, are just as real and directly observable as the things and facts themselves.  But relationships fluctuate and things are fluid.  It is well beyond this dry universe in which philosophers compose well-divided and well-constructed elements, and where each part is no longer only connected to another part, as experience tries to suggest, but is coordinated with Everything – which is what is suggested by reason.

James's "pluralism" has no other meaning than this.  Antiquity was represented as a closed, halted, finite world, a hypothesis that corresponds to certain demands of our reason.  Modern people tend to think of the infinite, which is another hypothesis that satisfies other demands of our reason.  From the point of view that James assumes, which is of pure experience or "radical empiricism," reality no longer appears to be finite or infinite, but simply indefinite.  It flows without our being able to ascertain whether it flows in one direction, nor whether it is always the same river flowing past.

Our reason is less satisfied.  It feels less at ease in a world where it can no longer find, as in a mirror, its own image.  And, doubtless, the importance of human reason is diminished.  But to what degree will the importance of man himself – of man in his entirety, in his willfulness and sensibility as well as in his intelligence – then find itself increased!

The universe conceived by our reason is, as it were, a universe that infinitely surpasses human experience.  The peculiar thing about reason is that it prolongs the data of experience, extending them by means of generalization, with the aim of having us conceive of things far past what we will ever glimpse.  In such a universe man is supposed to do few things and occupy little space: what he attributes to his intelligence he will take from his will.  Most of all, having accorded his mind the power of encompassing everything, he is then obliged to imagine all things in terms of thought: of his aspirations, his desires, and his enthusiasm he can hardly ask for clarification in a world where everything is accessible to be considered by him in advance, as if translatable into pure ideas.  His sensibility would never know how to clarify his intelligence, whose enlightenment was his own doing.

Most philosophies, therefore, shrink our experience with regard to emotion and willpower while at the same time prolonging this experience indefinitely in terms of thought.  What James asks of us is not to add too much to experience from hypothetical views, nor to mutilate something that is already solid.  We are not at all sure about what experience offers us; but we have to accept experience integrally, and our feelings provide this experience to the same extent as our perceptions do, to the same extent, consequently, as "things" do.  In the eyes of William James, complete man counts for something.

He counts for even more in a world that does not squash him by its immensity.  We are surprised by the importance that James, in one of his books, attributes to Fechner's curious theory that states Earth is an independent being blessed with a divine soul.  It may be that he sees in this a convenient means to symbolize – perhaps even to express – his own thinking.  The things and facts that compose our experience constitute for us a human world, connected undoubtedly to others, but so distanced from them and so close to us that we have to consider it, in practice, both sufficient for man and self-sufficient.  With things and events we create a body – we meaning everything of which we are conscious of being, everything we experience.  The powerful feelings that stir our souls at certain, privileged moments are forces just as real as those which interest a physicist: man creates them no more than he creates heat or light.  According to James, we bathe in an atmosphere which cuts across large spiritual currents.  If many among us grow rigid, others allow themselves to be carried off.  And he is one of those souls who open themselves as widely as possible to these salubrious airs.  Such people are those with the souls of mystics.  We know how sympathetically James studied these people.  When his book The Varieties of Religious Experience appeared, many saw in it only a series of very vivid descriptions and penetrating analyses – psychology, they said, of religious feeling.  How wrong they were about the author's mentality!  The truth is that James studied the mystic soul in the same way that we study the weather on a fine spring day to feel the caress of the breeze, or how, on the seashore, we survey the comings and goings of ships and the filling of their sails so as to learn in which direction the wind is blowing.  Souls filled with religious enthusiasm are truly lifted and transported: how could they not make us extract from real life, as if it were a scientific experiment, that force that lifts and transports?  There we have, without a doubt, the origin; there lies the idea that inspired the "pragmatism" of William James.  In his opinion, the most important truths for us to know are the truths that have been felt or lived before having been thought.

All this time we have said that there are truths that result from feeling as much as from reason.  And all this time we have also said that apart from the ready truths we have found, there are other truths that we assist in making which depend in part on our willpower.  Yet it should be noted that, in James's work, this idea takes on new meaning and force.  It blooms thanks to the conception of reality which is peculiar to his philosophy in a general theory of truth.