A Commonplace Book

...one of those parasitic books which situate Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Cannebiere or Don Quixote on Wall Street. Like all men of good taste, Menard abhorred these useless carnivals, fit only -- as he would say -- to produce the plebian pleasure of anachronism or (what is worse) to enthrall us with the elementary idea that all epochs are the same or are different.

There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter -- if not a paragraph or a name -- in the history of philosophy. In literature, this eventual caducity is even more notorious. The Quixote -- Menard told me -- was, above all, an entertaining book; now it is the occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical insolence and obscene de luxe editions. Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst.

Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid, and the book Le jardin du Centaure by Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Celine or James Joyce, is this not sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?