Views
It is curious to observe, in our civilised societies, men retaining their childhood names. First-communion photographs, those showing us in the form of a baby, flat on our belly among furs, or indeed as well-behaved little boys, placed in the proximity (or not) of a pier-table or a column, make it clear to us that the only unity we truly possess is perhaps that of the name. Was Buster Keaton, as a child, really a phlegmatic individual, such as today we imagine him?
It seems to me that a portrait, even if it dates only from the previous year, is always a mockery. It is never more than a species of cadaver and constitutes, of itself alone, by the very fact of its existence, a bewitchment. To drag one's old portraits along in one's wake is to become, as it were, a serpent entangled in its old skins. Better, as often as one can, to change one's name, appearance, occupations, wife, ideas, friends: that is no doubt the only course that permits us, without shame, to tolerate the sight of a photograph showing us as a child, unless we possess – like the Buster Keaton of the films – an inviolable <i>sang-froid</i> such that, stiffened like a stake by the sword of humour and, never laughing, we become an axis about which the nonsensical trivialities of shifting events gravitate...