No shock

Given to my moral nature had I known

Down to that very moment–neither lapse

Nor turn of sentiment–that might be named

A revolution, save at this one time:

All else was progress on the self-same path

On which with a diversity of pace

I had been travelling; this, a stride at once

Into another region.

He must have lived this war, in himself, according to two temporalities or two histories that were at the same time disjoined and inextricably associated. On the one hand, youth and the years of Occupation appeared there as a sort of prehistoric prelude: more and more distant, derealized, abstract, foreign. The “real” history, the effective and fruitful history, was constituted slowly, laboriously, painfully after this rupture which was also a second birth. But on the other hand and inversely, the “real” events (public and private), the grave, traumatic events, the effective and indelible history had already taken place, over there, during those terrible years … His “living present,” as someone might put it, was the crossroads of these two incompatible and disjunctive temporalities, temporalities that nonetheless went together, articulated in history, what was his history, the only one.