When I Was Old by Georges Simenon

nonsense. But won’t this whole notebook seem childish? That’s what it’s for, after all, to get rid of all the silly ideas that pass through my head. And I’m trying to forget all philosophical works, and avoid their vocabulary on purpose.
    We tend to be sentimental; at any rate we look – at least most of us – on little children and the dying with compassion.
    Between these two poles, for the being that is no longer a child and not yet dying, we have a tendency to be strict, even to be aggressive.
    And yet they are the same beings, only at different stages.
    Is it because at these two stages they do not compete with us, if I may put it this way?
    There is another explanation. The child and the person in the process of dying are, as it were, beings in their natural state, undisguised.
    As adolescents or adults, other factors will be added to their natural state: education, instruction, profession, environment, nationality, etc.
    To put it another way, they are: Man + … + … + …
    Each of these ‘pluses’ brings mannerisms and taboos with it.
    Suppose it were only those +s that we hate in our neighbours?
    Suppose, under that little crust of +s, we were to discover that man is no different from the baby or the dying?
    Suppose it were only the
acquired
factors that separate us?
    Curiously enough, as one sees in times of catastrophe, war, earthquakes, floods, shipwrecks, etc., whenever a powerful external event momentarily attenuates or destroys these acquired characteristics, there is sympathy, compassion, a sort of love between men who hated each other the day before.
    The difference between what I call the naked man and the clothed one.
    Are we really moving towards the naked man? It seems possible, since today, for the first time in history as far as I know, the undernourished peoples are talked about and the overfed people have bad consciences.
    Is this healthy? Was it healthier for each one to defend his place in the sun, to subject the weak to slavery and to kill for a yes or a no?
    We begin to respect human life to a point of extremity. We almost make a religion of it. It’s true of me. But I sometimes wonder if this is not sentimentality, if we are not going against natural law.
    The events in Africa worry us.
    What is most troubling of all is to consider the same
events, in turn, from the historical point of view, the biological, the sentimental, and the political.
    In the past, we must have had instinct, which guided us to where we are now. Is it still with us? Where is it? When does it speak?
    And if we have lost it, when and why did we lose it?
Same day, afternoon
    A mass-circulation paper, hence a paper that caters to public opinion and is careful not to shock it, yesterday or the day before carried an article by a lawyer not noted for his revolutionary opinions. It was concerned with the archaic quality of the Penal Code, both here and elsewhere, with laws that take no heed of our medical knowledge, particularly in the matter of the degree of responsibility of the criminal. He envisaged for the future a jury of specialists – not specialists in jurisprudence, but in medicine and psychology – and the conversion of prisons into asylums.
    This is a familiar theme in specialized journals almost everywhere in the world and particularly in the United States. The idea began by seeming revolutionary. Even today, among the doctors whom I meet, many are sceptical, and lawyers continue to believe in exemplary punishment and Society’s revenge.
    My very first Maigrets were imbued with the sense, which has always been with me, of man’s irresponsibility. This is never stated openly in my writings. But Maigret’s attitude towards the criminal makes it quite clear.
    I don’t write this in order to demonstrate that I was ahead of my time. I invented nothing. Even at that period these ideas had certainly been formulated by others. But it is still a fairly recent movement. It began with articles in the