Profound Thought No. 1

Following the stars
Finishing in the fishbowl
A red end.

(Poursuivre les etoiles
Dans le bocal a poisons
Rouges finir)

Apparently, from time to time, adults do sit down and contemplate the disaster that their life is. They feel sorry for themselves and like mosquitoes that bang themselves all the time against the same glass pane, they get agitated, suffer, get depressed, feel hopeless and rail against an unkind fate that has brought them exactly where they don’t want to be. The more intelligent of them even make a religion out of it: “ Oh, this contemptible, comfortable and vacant middle-class existence!” Several cynics of this type dine at Papa’s table: “What happened to the dreams of our youth?” they ask with an air realization and self-satisfaction. “They have been stolen and life is a bitch”. I hate this false lucidity and maturity. The truth - they are like others, kids who don’t understand what has happened to them and who play at being older and strong even though they want to cry.

Its really quite simple to understand. Unfortunately, children believe what adults say and then they become adults and take revenge on their kids by telling them “Life has a meaning – meaning as determined by adults” and that universal lie everyone is obliged to believe. By the time one is old enough to understand that its all wrong, it is too late. The mystery remains and all the energy of a lifetime is wasted on stupid activities. There isn’t much left to do other than anaesthetizing oneself to it all, hiding the fact that one doesn’t really find any meaning in life (perhaps even from oneself) and then fool ones kids into thinking there is a meaning to it all.

The folks who hang out with my family have all followed the same path – a youth spent in trying to stabilize their intelligence, squeezing like a lemon their education and assuring for themselves a position amongst the comfortably off and then spend the rest of life asking themselves with bewilderment why such hopes are wasted on such an empty existence. Folks believe that they are following their stars but instead of climbing into the sky they end up like gold fish in a tank. I ask, would it not be simpler to teach children from the start that life is quite absurd. That would kill some happy moments in childhood but would make for considerable savings to an adult even without accounting for being spared of the trauma of being a gold fish.

Me, I’m 12 years old and I live at No. 7 Grenelle road in a luxurious apartment. My parents are rich, my family is rich and my sister and I are consequently, well, RICH. My dad is a deputy after having been a minister. My mom… well, mom is not exactly the brightest of bulbs but she is educated. She has her doctorate in lit. She writes perfect dinner invitations and spends her time boring us to death with literary references.

Despite this. Despite all this luck and all the money for a long time now, I know the final destination is going to be the fish-bowl. How do I know this? I am smart. Even exceptionally smart. Already if one sees kids my age, it’s the pits. I have no special wish to be marked out and in my family, which places such a premium on intelligence, a talented kid would never get peace. So I try at school to under perform but despite my efforts I’m always first. One would think that acting dumb, especially when one has a high IQ is easy. Let me tell you – its not. It takes a lot of hard work to appear dumber. In a way though the deception keeps me from dying of boredom: the time that does not go towards studying, I spend in imitating the style, the responses, the preoccupations and little faults of ordinary students. I read all the Constance Baret, the second in class does in maths , in French and in history and I learn what I need to do: in French it needs to be a set of words which are spelt accurately, in maths a mechanical reproduction of meaningless operations and in history a series of facts linked by conjunctions. Even in comparison with adults I’m a lot smarter than the majority of them. That is just the way it is. I am not especially proud of it because I’m not here for any special purpose. And this I know for sure – I will not go into the fishbowl. It’s a well thought out decision. For someone like me – intelligent, good at studies, different from others and superior for the most part, life is already traced out and the fate charted out is sad enough to make one cry. No one has thought that if life is absurd, being a brilliant success has as much value as being a failure. Its just more comfortable.

I have therefore taken my decision. I will end adulthood and despite my certainty that life is a farce, I do not believe that I can live it till the logical end. Deep inside, we are programmed to believe in that which does not exist because we are living beings and we don’t want to suffer. So we spend all our energy in convincing ourselves that there is something out there that is worth the pain and that is what will give life more meaning. And smart as I am I don’t know how long I will be able to resist this biological urge. Once my life takes the adult path will I still be able to see the ridiculousness of it all? I don’t think so. And that is why I have taken my decision: at the end of this school year, the day I turn 13, the 16th of June to be precise, I will kill myself. I am not going to do this with much fanfare. In fact, it would be preferable if they did not suspect it to be suicide. Adults have a morbid, hysterical approach to death and give it a disproportionate importance when it is one of the most banal events in the world. My Japanese side is obviously attracted to seppuku. (When I say my Japanese side I refer to my love for Japan.) I’m now in the fourth form and have Japanese for a second language. The prof is not too bad. He swallows half his French words and spends considerable amounts of time in ­scratching his head with an air of perplexity, but the text book is decent and I am making great progress I would prefer to read my mangas in the original, you see. Mom doesn’t understand that and goes on “how can a girl as smart as you read manga?”. I haven’t explained to her that “manga” in Japanese simply means comic strip. She believes that I am abasing myself with a lesser culture and I don’t disabuse her such notions. I could read Taniguchi in Japanese. But let me get back to the point: It needs to be done before the 16th of June because on that day I will kill myself. But no sepukku. It would be beautiful and meaningful…but… I really don’t want to suffer any pain. In fact, I hate pain. I had to consider this when I took my decision. Death ought to be a delicate passage, a graceful glide towards the final resting place. There are folks who jump from windows on the 4th floor or by swallow Javel or hang themselves. Its stupid. I find it obscene. Why would you want to kill yourself that way if you are doing it to stop the suffering?!

I’ve thought through my exit: for the past one year, every month, I steal one of mom’s sleeping pills. She takes so many of them she might not have noticed if I had taken one a day, but I’m a cautious person. Take no chances, that is my policy when it comes to projects where the smallest possibility of being fond out exists.

So here I am proceeding tranquilly towards the 16th of June and I have no fear. Just some regrets, perhaps. But the world is not made for princesses. That said, its not necessary to vegetate just because one has decided to die. In fact, its quite the contrary. Its not important how one dies or at what age, what is important is what one was doing at the moment of death. In Taniguchi, the heroes die while climbing Mt. Everest. Since I have no chance of attempting K2 or Grandes Jorasses before the 16th, my Everest is going to be an intellectual pursuit. I have set myself the goal of having only the most profound thoughts and I will note them down in this diary: if nothing has meaning, one must atleast have the spirit to confront it, no? But since my Japanese side is particularly strong, I have added a condition: this profound thought has to be formulated as a small Japanese poem : a haiku or a tanka. My favorite Haiku is one of Basho’s:

A Fisherman’s Hut
Full of Shrimp
The Crickets!


Now that is not like the fish bowl, that is poetry,

But the world I live in has less poetry than the huts of Jap fishermen. Do you find it normal that four people have 400 square meters when there are several others, and some may even be poor poets, don’t have decent housing and are shut up in a 15X20 room? This summer I heard on the news that some Africans had died because a fire in the stairwell had spread throughout their building and that gave me an idea. The gold fish spent all day talking about how the poor Africans could not escape. My parents and Colombe think they swim in an ocean and nothing will happen to them because of their 400 square meters filled with furniture and art.

So on 16th June I plan to refresh their memory of sardines: I shall set fire to the apartment (with the barbecue lighter). I’m not a criminal: I shall do this when there is no one in. (16th is a Saturday and Saturday afternoon, Colombe is off at Tibere’s, mom is at yoga and dad is at his club and me – I shall stay home). I’ll get the cats out through the window, call the firefighters well in time and then shall head off peacefully to sleep in moms bedroom with my sleeping pills.

Without an apartment and without a daughter they will perhaps think of those poor dead Africans.