When I Was Old by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online Page A

selection of the individual, in the embryonic state, that it will be possible to produce human beings of superior intelligence (by what criterion?) and human beings who, totally fearless, will make ideal soldiers, all muscle, and others …
    So many centuries of effort to arrive at the ant!
    Is this science’s answer, its solution, to the problem of natural selection? The word ‘natural’ no longer applies since it is a matter of a human, in some sense abstract, solution.
    This frightens me as much as planned teaching, the schoolboy’s report book which, beginning with his twelfth year, accompanies the future man, comments from teachers and physicians who, at various stages, decide first the fate of the child, then that of the young man, then that of the adult. Custom-made competencies to fit the needs of the community, taking natural aptitudes into account.
    This revolution – for it is one, and very much more important, I think, than the French or the Russian Revolution – is being accomplished under our eyes without arousing a single protest.
    Social security is no less a revolution since it assumes that man is neither free nor responsible for his own
future. The community takes him in charge. And, taking him in charge, takes on, in all logic, rights over him. Yesterday, in the French Chamber, for the first time the principle of the suppression of home distilleries was discussed.
    This means in general that drunkenness in the provinces is costing the State too much. It also means that the apples from his apple trees no longer completely belong to the farmer since he may not turn them into alcohol
for his personal use.
    Aspirin also is dangerous for some people. And so are fried potatoes. These are far-reaching things. I wonder if those who decide these measures realize what they imply.
    (I am always the first to deplore drunkenness, but isn’t it an illness, both individual and social, which has only the vaguest relationship with apples, plums, and the wastes that these home distillers transform? What frightens me – or makes me laugh – or enrages me, I’m not quite sure – is the erosion of certain basic principles that were in use for so long and their replacement by principles that are not yet written, nor formulated, but which spring no less from measures which, at first glance, appear to be only measures of a practical order.)
22 July 1960
    The other day I spoke of evenings spent in dance halls and cabarets, then of nights on the Place des Vosges. This
was my first contact with a world other than the one that was open to me in Liège. At that time I did not really know either the country or the sea. The country only by having gone three or four years for several weeks at a time to Embourg, where one arrived by trolley, and which is now a suburb. The sea by having seen it twice from the Belgian coast. I was a real city boy then, used to pavements, houses touching one another, small gardens separated by walls.
    I think it was in 1924 that I went to Bénouville, then to Etretat, and that I spent three or four months there. In 1925, at Porquerolles, I discovered the life of the sea, of fish, of crabs, of algae, and I remember that it made me dizzy and frightened me. It was a little like wine that was too strong. Above all, what I discovered was the incessant struggle for life, how fish were always on the defensive or on the offensive; innate, indispensable cruelty.
    The next year, I wanted to discover France, and I didn’t do it by highways or railroads. I wanted, as I’ve since tried to do in all things, to look behind the scenes. It wasn’t as a sporting event (it wasn’t one at that period) that I chose to follow rivers and canals from the North to the South and from the East to the West.
    A little town, a village, are not the same seen from the river or from the canal as they are seen from the road. One sees their true face, their most ancient one, this way.
    My first boat was the
Ginette.
    A year