When I Was Old by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online

sick men.
    Then a number of diseases, more and more serious, were discovered and classified. After the bacteria and Rickettsia, the virus was arrived at. Eight-hundred-and-fifty-some at the last census. Now, seen through the electronic microscope, they are all the same and one cannot distinguish one from another.
    Forty-eight viruses just for influenza.
    And all evolve. New forms develop from cultures.
    By dividing, does one not move towards simplification, to arrive, perhaps, one day at that unity which some foresaw and sought?
    Hasn’t this unity almost been attained in physics?
    To arrive finally at one disease,
Le Mal
, Evil, or the destructive principle, but as many forms of this illness as there are invalids.
    For a number of years we knew only of four types of blood – O, A, B, and AB. Then the Rhesus factor was
discovered. By now, seventeen or eighteen new subdivisions have been found, and a haematologist told me recently that it is not impossible that each person has a different type of blood.
    At the same time, about forty per cent of specialists tend to consider virus as a chemical composition rather than as living matter.
    From there to thinking that the reactions of different types of blood in the presence of an element which is unique in principle but which is transformed by each new contact, that these reactions, say I, constitute
the
multiform disease, rather than diseases …
    There is nothing scientific about this, obviously. But weren’t the theories of a Paracelsus often even more literary?
    It would be curious, intriguing. The mystic foresees science as Confucius foresaw the composition of the atom.
    Man first envisages unity.
    Then, forcing himself to divide, to partition, to multiply the elements …
    And, by dint of dividing thus, returns to unity.
    It is unimportant whether this is true or not. It delights me. And it gives me an impression of complicity with the world that surrounds me. I should say of solidarity, but I prefer complicity.
    It bothers me to belong to a human group, a nation, a race, a society. I feel more at ease in thinking that I am part of a vaster whole in which I am side by side with amoebas, on a level if not of equality, at least of … I can’t find the word and I won’t stop for it.
    A difference in time. The happenstance of arriving at this or that point on the curve. I am a man but I could have been an amoeba. Difference of degree, then, in evolution.
    It will be said that I haven’t sufficiently digested reading I wasn’t prepared for. It’s very possible. So much the worse and so much the better. I say so much the better because I find it to my profit.
    Noon. I’m back from a short walk in town – and purchases, of course! – with the children. Each time I open this notebook it’s with the intention of writing a sentence or two. Then I stretch it out.
    Medicine and social work, during these past years, have more or less suppressed natural selection. A new law has been added to the famous Rights of Man: the Right to Life. The right of the embryo to become a complete so-called being, at any cost. And already one glimpses the Right to Health. Free medicine, free care foreshadow it, as free studies foreshadow the Right to Knowledge.
    By dint of claiming or receiving rights, won’t man come to lose them all? What will be left of him, what will the human being be after several generations of no selection?
    And, as for the Right to Health, what will happen on the day, which seems near at hand, when worn-out organs, deficient glands, will be replaced by other human organs?
    Yesterday, at a medical convention that was held in
London, an expert from the United States (I don’t like the word ‘expert’ which the newspapers and consequently the public today apply to anyone with a diploma who enunciates any hypothesis whatsoever), an American expert, that is, could say, without rousing any protest that by about 1980 or 1990 medicine will be able to practise prenatal