Climates Read Free Page B

or a lesser degree, hagridden. Even when all goes well, all does not go perfectly well. Life remains, on the face of it, absurd. What is the meaning of this strange carnival? Why are we here on this fleck of mud, revolving in darkness? … We want peace, concord and the affection of other peoples, and lo and behold here we are at war, massacring and being massacred. Or again we are in love with a woman who at times seems to love us in return and, at others, for no reason known to us, grows cold and distant. We do not understand the universe; we do not understand those who hate us; we do not understand those who love us; often we do not even understand our parents, our children. We do not understand ourselves
.
    The only possibility of introducing meaning into such a world lies in art, he concludes, and especially in literature. It is the author’s task to create stories that are orderly enough to be coherent, but not so neat that they fail to reflect the true mystery and complexity of human life.
    Climates
is such a story. It is orderly, yet unsettling. It breathes an air that is profoundly civilized, yet there is something violent and shattering about it too. “Even when it’s mutual, love is terrible,” says Philippe. It is terrible simply to be human—and there can be no subject more interesting to write about, or more beautiful, than that.
FURTHER READING
    André Maurois
. Bibliothèque Nationale, 1977. An exhibition catalog.
    Dominique Bona,
Il n’y a qu’un amour
. Bernard Grasset, 2003. An account of the lives of Jane-Wanda de Szymkiewicz and Simone de Caillavet.
    Jack Kolbert,
The Worlds of André Maurois
. Associated University Press, 1985.
    André Maurois,
Memoirs 1885–1967
. Translated by Denver Lindley. Harper and Row, 1970.
    André Maurois,
Ariel: A Life of Shelley
. Translated by Ella d’Arcy. Kessinger, 2003.
    André Maurois,
Illusions
. Introduction by Edouard Morot-Sir. Columbia University Press, 1968.
    Stendhal,
On Love
. Hesperus, 2000.



. I .
    You must have been surprised when I left so suddenly. I apologize for that but do not regret it. I cannot tell whether you too can hear the hurricane of internal music stirring inside me over the last few days like Tristan da Cunha’s towering flames. Oh! I would so like to succumb to the tempest that, only the day before yesterday, in the forest, urged me to touch your white dress. But I am afraid of love, Isabelle, and of myself. I do not know what Renée or anyone else may have told you about my life. You and I have sometimes talked of it; I have not told you the truth. That is the charm of new acquaintances: the hope that, in their eyesand by denying the truth, we can transform a past that we wish had been happier. Our friendship has gone beyond the point of overly flattering confidences. Men surrender their souls, as women do their bodies, in successive and carefully defended stages. One after the other, I have thrown my most secret troops into battle. My true memories, corralled in their enclave, will soon give themselves up and come out into the open.
    I am a long way from you now, in the very room in which I slept as a child. On the wall are the shelves laden with books that my mother has been keeping for over twenty years “for her eldest grandson.” Will I have sons? That wide red spine stained with ink is my old Greek dictionary; those gold bindings, my prizes. I wish I could tell you everything, Isabelle, from the sensitive little boy to the cynical adolescent, and on to the unhappy, wounded man. I wish I could tell you everything in complete innocence, exactitude, and humility. Perhaps, if I manage to finish writing this, I will not have the courage to show it to you. Never mind. It is still worthwhile, if only for my own sake, to assess what my life has been.
    Do you remember one evening on the way back from Saint-Germain when I described Gandumasto you? It is a bleakly beautiful place. A torrential river cuts between our factories,