On Monday I found a diary on the pavement. It was battered and red and when I picked it up the binding was sticky. It had no name in it, was dated 2021, and was filled mainly with phone numbers, shopping lists and hospital appointments. Near the front, tucked between some receipts, was a black and white photo of a little boy. He’s on a merry-go-round, ever so slightly out of focus as he rides a little Vespa, his face tilted towards the sky, hair cropped and ears big; to his left a little girl on a bike, she has a bowl cut and her gaze is fixed straight ahead. Despite being included in the diary, there’s nothing directly suggesting it’s the owner or someone they know. The photo itself could have been taken anywhere between 1950 and the late 70s. There were no names or dates written on the back, only E766 stamped in black ink. It looks at once like a family photograph and a postcard.
I flicked through the pages. Intrigue and nosiness matching the hope of finding a means of returning it. I found nothing. Only one page included anything that wasn’t administrative. Not far from the half-way point in the year were three notes written in blue biro. The first was the only one fully legible. It read:
Être aimer est + dur d’aimer
To be loved is harder than to love. There’s a sense of urgency to the script, the + in place of plus, the grammatical error of paired infinitives (aimer should be in its past participle: aimé). Was it written after a rejection? A break up? Do they find themself unloveable? Or did they just find the thought profound? Perhaps they’d overheard it somewhere, read it. Whatever it was, it was deemed worthy of writing in a diary that contained no other writing. Whatever it was, I’m not sure I agree with the sentiment. Both can be immensely difficult, both painful. There’s also questions of definition and circumstance. Overall, though, I don’t think we have any more say in the matter of someone loving us than of us loving them. Love is out of our hands. It’s beyond decision. It just happens.
The other two notes, as said, were only half-clear. I tried to make sense of them, but felt uneasy stood opposite a café staring at something people had seen me pick up off the ground, so I took a photo of the page in question and left the diary on top of an electricity box a few steps from where I’d found it.
At home I zoomed in on the photo. The second note, unpunctuated and written directly beneath the first, was the clearer of the two. At first all I could make out was:
La vie est un ??? celui qui ??? pas même rire P pas de vivre
Life is a ??? he who does not ??? does not even laugh does not live
Here again the script implies urgency. The lack of punctuation, the omissions in the negations, the P in place of pas, all suggesting a captured thought, a compulsive and necessary documentation. It’s also wrong, grammatically speaking. The first clause is fine, but the last two are incorrect. Incorrect but understandable, and that’s all that matters. Perhaps, like me, French isn’t their mother tongue. Perhaps they attempted some poetic flare that didn’t work out. It doesn’t matter. The Principle of Charity applies to translation just as much as it does to philosophy.
And besides, it was so nearly clear. The two indecipherable words were the same, that I was sure of. They both started with c. The two following letters I couldn’t make out but looked like an e and an n, with a scoop in the cursive linking them to a b, ending with what was either ot or at. Nothing immediately came to mind. Was the scoop a letter or a link? If it was a letter it had to be a u; but cenubat isn’t a word, nor cenubot. I checked the dictionary and went through all the words starting with cen but none of them worked. My eyes and brain at this point were useless. They had a fixed idea of what the letters were despite not being sure. The more I looked the less likely it was that I’d decipher anything, so I went to the café on the corner, had a coffee in the sun, and walked over to the left bank, where I followed the Seine up into the 6th. It was humid, my skin itchy and sore. After a recommendation from my professor, I was going to visit his favourite book shop: L’Écume des pages. When I arrived I discovered that its neighbour was Café de flore, a famed and former hang out of the left bank intelligentsia, now a tourist hotspot. People were taking selfies where Bataille and Picasso took their phone calls. Beside it, at Les Deux Magots, the one time haunt of Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus, the same thing played out, a line of people waiting to get in. Interestingly, despite the tourists, both maintain a local clientele.
Standing by a kiosk, I thought about how differently the UK markets its intellectual and artistic heritage. That despite wracking my brain, knowing fine well that there are equivalents of sorts across the Channel, I couldn’t think of any. I texted my girlfriend and asked her. She jokingly said the Elephant Café, birthplace of Harry Potter. Undoubtedly an equivalent, if not an infantilised one, featuring on all the must-see lists of things to do in Edinburgh.
I went into the bookshop, and as I browsed we went back and forth over WhatsApp, coming to a sixfold conclusion as to what might have caused this difference in the marketing of such spaces: 1) British café culture is different; 2) any iconic cafés have probably been demolished or redeveloped; 3) social clubs played a huge role in our intellectual/artistic history, and their being members only prevents them from becoming tourist destinations; 5) despite a culturally rich 20th century, the UK has a greater marketing focus on its pre-20th century luminaries and associated locations (think Stratford-upon-Avon, the Jane Austen house, etc.), so the great majority of places where they spent their public time probably no longer exist, and if they do, they’re almost certainly no longer cafés or pubs. Of course, to this, there are many caveats.
And it’s not like we don’t market places like Oxford and Cambridge as tourist destinations, it’s not like the Cavern Club isn’t one of the most visited spots in Liverpool, this cultural difference isn’t necessarily a black-mark of philistinism. It’s just a difference.
The next morning, procrastinating some work I had to do, I opened my phone to look at the photo I’d taken of the page. Instantly the word revealed itself. Combat. Of course. It had to be. It was the only thing that made sense. Now the question was, how to translate it? Life is a combat sounds bad in English. But what about its synonyms? Struggle, fight, battle. Battle’s crap, pompous and clunky. Fight works, more so in the second clause than the first, and given that they’ve used the same word twice I’d do the same. Struggle, then. Life is a struggle. He who does not struggle, does not even laugh, does not live.
Not that I have any duty, or need, to agree or disagree with what this unknown person has written, this note, far more than the first, I do agree with—wholeheartedly. This anonymous aphorism mirrors what so many of the thinkers who frequented those aforementioned cafés wrote. The necessity of laughter, its relation to suffering, the momentary reprieve it brings about and the joy of sharing it. The laugh appears so much in French thought. Bergson reckoned our ability to laugh socially, echoing Aristotle, separated us from the animals. Bataille said that ‘laughter indicates the farthest limits of language and reason.’ Cioran regularly marvelled at our capacity to laugh in our darkest moments, praising laughter’s salve, citing its necessity to live. Alongside every possible synonym for misery and struggle and suicide, rire (to laugh) is one of the words he returns to most. ‘Laughter,’ he said, ‘is an act of superiority, a triumph of man over the universe, a marvellous discovery that reduces things to their just proportions.’
All that remained now was the third note, by far and away the most illegible—a scrawled stanza at the bottom of the page.
À toi je t’aime
Mama Fa???
????? et
????????
Toutes les femmes gentilles
I kept repeating the words. I kept looking at them. I tried writing them down myself to see if it revealed what the missing links were. Nothing. No moment of clarity, no seeing things anew. They love someone. Their mum? Mama someone? Who knows. I gave up staring and started the work I’d been putting off. When I called it a day, I walked back to where I’d found the diary. It was still there.
Unaddressed so far, but considered since the discovery, have been the ethics of all this. You can’t help but bring it back to yourself: how would I feel if someone found my diary, translated what I’d written, commented on it, wrote about it and put it out into the world for people to read? The answer is, I do and don’t know. What I know is that if someone found my diary and published my name alongside their commentary on what I’d written, I’d feel violated. Is my not including their name, as there’s no name to include, avoiding this act of violation? I’m aware that I am invading someone’s privacy. I’m aware that I’m putting someone’s thoughts out into the world without their permission. Perhaps because I’m the one doing this I feel that if someone did it to me I’d be OK with it. If someone left out any truly identifying features, then having three of my notes put out into the world would be interesting. I don’t know them, they don’t know me, no one reading this will ever know the person behind the biro. But is that alright? Am I just drawing arbitrary lines in the sand to give myself the go ahead with writing this?
That night I couldn’t sleep, so I walked about the neighbourhood; past all the closed shops and bars and cafés, past the sleeping homeless men and beneath the streetlights. I was full of longing, wide awake, the temperature was perfect. I walked towards the post office, a fire-engine drove by. I turned the corner and laughed. The diary was still there.
I woke up on Thursday to rain and my first thought was the diary, its pages getting destroyed, the ink washing away, the photo obscured. I felt a pang of sadness. I thought about its owner, who at this point had no doubt accepted that it’s lost, but who may not have accepted its loss. I tried to imagine who they were, what they look like. Nothing. They are entirely anonymous. They will remain entirely anonymous. But they will continue to live a life. Somewhere out there that is exactly what they’re doing.
It was a busy day and I didn’t have time to try and parse what remained of the last note, but on Friday I realised that the three missing words were all names. Three names, three identifiable things. Identifiable to who? I don’t know. But to include them would render this note different to the others, which, despite being personal, remain anonymous philosophical expressions. Completed, this stanza is an expression of love—as it is incomplete. Incomplete it announces no one and stands alongside the other two notes nicely. They feel it is harder to be loved than to love, here they express their love. They feel life is a struggle, they struggle on, and in so doing, by their own metrics, they live.
On Saturday the diary was gone.