Читать книгу The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery - Страница 17

The strong ones

Among humans

Do nothing

They talk

And talk again

It’s one of my profound thoughts, but it came from another profound thought. It was one of Papa’s guests, at the dinner party yesterday, who said: ‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach, teach the teachers; and those who can’t teach the teachers go into politics.’ Everyone seemed to find this very inspiring but for the wrong reasons. ‘That’s so true,’ said Colombe, who is an expert at fake self-criticism. She’s one of those who think that knowledge is power and forgiveness: if I know that I belong to a self-satisfied elite who are sacrificing the common good through an excess of arrogance, this liberates me from criticism, and I come out with twice the prestige. Papa also tends to think like this, although he’s less of an idiot than my sister. He still believes that something known as duty exists and although in my opinion that’s just pure fancy, it protects him from the cynic’s weakness. Let me explain: nobody is a greater schoolgirl in spirit than a cynic. Cynics cannot relinquish the rubbish they were taught as children: they hold tight to the belief that the world has meaning and, when things go wrong for them, they consequently adopt the inverse attitude. ‘Life’s a whore, I don’t believe in anything any more and I’ll wallow in that idea until it makes me sick’ is the very credo of the innocent who hasn’t been able to get his way. That’s my sister to a T. She may be a student at the École Normale, but she still believes in Santa Claus, not because she has a good heart but because she is totally childish. She started giggling like an idiot when Papa’s colleague came out with his fancy phrase, as if to say, ‘I’m an expert on the mise en abyme,’ and that confirmed what I’ve been thinking for a long time: Colombe is a walking disaster.

As for me, I think that his sentence is a bona fide profound thought, precisely because it isn’t true, or at least not entirely true. It doesn’t mean what you think it does at the outset. If people could climb higher in the social hierarchy in proportion to their incompetence, I guarantee the world would not go round the way it does. But that’s not even the problem. What his sentence means isn’t that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it’s words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who’ve been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get shafted by the others, the fine talkers, despite the latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.