Reading Camus’s notebooks and I suddenly feel terror. I came here from there. Yes, yes. I am sure of it. Too personal, S. Don’t read his notebooks. Too personal.
Line to Maria Cesares regarding his return to Paris (five days before his death):
Let’s say [Tuesday] in principle, taking into account surprises on the road…
I want to cry. I feel separated from him. I feel filled with prophecies of the past.
Paris, Paris. I have never been to Paris. What does death look like there?
I remember the first time I saw Camus. Hindi translation of The Fall. Patan. I had heard my parents talk about him before but I didn’t know it was him.
The train ride back to Delhi from Bangalore. December 2010. I read The Fall in those (almost) two days. Then, I tried reading The Plague.
Last year, in Calcutta: a dead mosquito on my copy of The Plague.
Last month, a friend told me how her friend’s mother died. She was struck by her coldness.
“She sent me such a formal text message, you won’t believe. She wrote: Mother passed away yesterday. Please come for the requiem ceremony today at — church. Thanks.”
“The language. I couldn’t read it. Mother passed away yesterday.”
All I could think about was how in August, while reading Anna Karenina at Delhi airport, I saw on a screen in front of me: Today’s bad news: a woman jumps in front of a train in Janakpuri.
Camus, Notebooks (1951-1959):
Journalism, according to Tolstoy: an intellectual mess. He wanted to write a novel “where there were none guilty.” Letter from a dying Turgenev to Tolstoy: “I have been happy to be your contemporary.”
The future. Do you want to see the future? Read the fiction of this year.
My life has been written about in a book that I will probably never find. Someone has read my future. Someone has read the letter that I will write before my death.
Everything is written.
A word began me.
Beyond Six Rivers 