Like the Flowing River

The car returns to the road and finally stops, lying on its left side. I can see the driver's shirt. I stop beside him with just one thought in my head: I must get out and help him. At that moment, I feel my wife's nails digging into my arm: she is begging me, please, to drive on and park further off; the other car might explode, catch fire.

I drive on for another hundred metres and park. The CD continues playing the Brazilian music as if nothing had happened. Everything seems so surreal, so distant. My wife and Isabel, the maid, run towards the scene of the accident. Another car, coming in the opposite direction, stops. A woman jumps out, looking very upset. Her headlights, too, have lit up that Dantesque scene. She asks if I've got a mobile phone. I do. Then why don't I phone for an ambulance!

What is the emergency number? She looks at me - everyone knows that! 51 51 51! My mobile phone is switched off - at the cinema, they always remind patrons to do that. I key in the access code and we phone the emergency number - 51 51 51. I know exactly where it all happened: between the villages of Laloubere and Horgues.

My wife and the maid return: the boy in the car has a few scratches, but apparently nothing very grave. Nothing very grave, after what I saw, after turning over six times! He staggers slightly when he gets out of the car; other motorists stop; the firemen are on the scene within five minutes; everything is all right.

Everything is all right. But he had been a fraction of a second away from hitting our car and hurling us into the ditch; things, then, would have been very bad for all of us. Very bad indeed.

When I get home, I look up at the stars. Sometimes we encounter things on our path, but because our time has not yet come, they brush past us, without touching us, even though they were close enough for us to see them. I thank God for the awareness to understand, as a friend of mine says, that everything that had to happen happened, but nothing did.

The Moment of Dawn

During the World Economic Forum at Davos, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace, Shimon Peres, told the following story.

A Rabbi gathered together his students and asked them: 'How do we know the exact moment when night ends and day begins?'

'When it's light enough to tell a sheep from a dog,' said one boy.

Another student said: 'No, when it's light enough to tell an olive tree from a fig tree.'

'No, that's not a good definition either.'

'Well, what's the right answer?' asked the boys.

And the Rabbi said:

'When a stranger approaches, and we think he is our brother, and all conflicts disappear, that is the moment when night ends and day begins.'

A January Day in 2005

It's raining hard today, and the temperature is about 3degC. I decide to go for a walk - I don't feel that I work properly if I don't walk every day - but it's very windy too, and so, after about ten minutes, I drive back home. I pick up the newspaper from my mailbox, but it contains nothing of importance, only the things that journalists have decided we should know, feel involved in, and have an opinion about.

I go over to my computer to check my e-mails.

Nothing new, just a few unimportant decisions to be made which take me no time at all to resolve.

I try doing some archery, but the wind makes it impossible. I've written my latest biennial book, which, this time, is entitled The Zahir and which won't be published for several weeks. I've written the columns I publish on the internet. I've updated my web page. I've had my stomach checked out and, fortunately, no abnormality was found (I had been very frightened about having a tube put down my throat, but it turned out to be nothing very terrible). I've been to the dentist. The plane tickets I'd been waiting for have finally arrived by express mail. I have things to do tomorrow and things which I finished yesterday, but today...

Today I have absolutely nothing that requires my attention.

I feel uneasy. Shouldn't I be doing something? Well, if I wanted to invent work, that wouldn't take much effort. We all have projects to develop, light bulbs to change, leaves to sweep, books to put away, computer files to organize. But how about just facing up to the void?

I put on a hat, thermal clothes, and a waterproof jacket and go out into the garden. That way, I should be able to withstand the cold for the next four or five hours. I sit down on the wet grass and start making a mental list of what is going through my head:

(a) I'm useless. Everyone else at that moment is busy, working hard.

Answer: I work hard too, sometimes twelve hours a day. Today I just happen to have nothing to do.

(b) I have no friends. Here I am, one of the most famous writers in the world, and I'm all alone; even the phone doesn't ring.

Answer: Of course I have friends, but they respect my need for solitude when I'm at the old mill in St Martin in France.

(c) I need to go and buy some glue.

Yes, I've just remembered that yesterday I ran out of glue. Why not jump in the car and go to the nearest town? And I stop at that thought. Why is it so difficult to stay as I am now, doing nothing?

A series of thoughts cross my mind: friends who worry about things that haven't yet happened; acquaintances who manage to fill every minute of their lives with tasks that seem to me absurd; senseless conversations; long telephone calls in which nothing of any importance is ever said; bosses who invent work in order to justify their jobs; officials who feel afraid because they have been given nothing important to do that day, which might mean that they are no longer useful; mothers who torment themselves because their children have gone out for the evening; students who torment themselves over their studies, over tests and exams.