You who travel little, you who never travel:  still, there comes the odd day when you happen to take a train.  At the station there are lots of businessmen.  You can spot them from a distance, by their missing faces.  The same man, in dozens of copies.  The same young man, old in his words, embalmed in his future.  You look at them somewhat fearfully, the way as a child you used to look at dried-up old people with their somber voices.  The train pulls in.  It's one of those express trains invented by  these businessmen, for their personal convenience.  There is a straight line of light-colored carriages.  There is a clutch of cold wind that flattens fields and empties them of their furrows, their accents, their nerves.  These are fields deserted by gazes, by men, by beasts; lowly clumps of earth tossed to the dogs of speed.  The countryside is a void now, and so you pass through it quickly.  And confronted with this void of countryside you become acquainted with the mass-produced man, the absent man:  he goes from Paris to Tokyo, from Tokyo to New York.  He goes everywhere on an electric earth, like a corpse laid out in death.  He takes trains, the kind that go from one point to another.  From nothing to nothing.  In his haste he takes the void with him.  However often he speaks, he hears only himself.  However far he goes, he finds only himself.  Wherever he goes he leaves behind a stain of gray; he sleeps in the midst of what he sees.  And so you say to yourself:  these people who travel so much never take a single step forward.  To really see something, you have to touch its opposite.  You've never been able to see anything in any other way:  through shadow you go towards light.  Through indifference you reach love.  It's the same with these men in their luxury trains, their night flights.  It's the same with these men, annihilated by the financial sameness they carry with them:  when you see them, you discover a type of man that they do not know how to reduce, a man who goes much farther than just the ends of the earth.  When you see them you discover the man who has been displaced and confused.  Who has found no consolation for an excess of childhood or of hunger.  On his face are all the skies; in his heart, all the voices.  Thus, there are two types of man.  The motionless man of long business trips—he has a position in the world.  He works so to become one with his position.  He extracts cold matter, dead languages, from that place.  Reason, ambition, power.  He feels equally at ease in industry and morality, in love affairs and bank accounts.  He eliminates any differences in his language.  He can spread this illness of self wherever he goes.  He can be everywhere because he is timeless.  The businessman is merely the latest avatar, the most recent version of the pale man.  The pale man is the social man, the useful man, convinced of his usefulness.  He is the man with the weakest identity—that of keeping things in their place, that of the eternal lie of living in society. 

And then there is that other type of man.  A useless fellow.  Wonderfully useless.  He certainly didn't invent the wheelbarrow, ATM cards, or nylon stockings. He never invents a thing. He neither adds to nor takes away from the world: he leaves it.  Or he finds that the world has left him, it's the same thing.  You might see him here or there, driving his flock of thoughts before him.  He dreams in every language. You can see him from a long way off: he's like those men in the desert, those blue men.  He's like those people with their flesh tinted from the cloth that protects them from the sun. His heart is seized with blue.  You see him here and there, in the uprisings he inspires, in the flames that devour him. In the books he writes.  It is in order to see him that you read.  For your nomadic hours, for the fresh breeze of a phrase beneath the draperies of ink.  You go from book to book, from encampment to encampment: there's no end to reading.  It's like love, like hope, and it's hopeless....