206 Derrida 1963–1983
only a poem could express. [.. .] But perhaps you still want to
see things too clearly, where the place of the poem is obscure...^63
It was also poetry that Derrida discussed in one of his last letters
to Gabriel Bounoure. Beginning with a quotation from Mallarmé
- ‘I stand amid the hubbub of a shore tormented by the waves’ –,
he added that the ‘waves’ had indeed been very powerful since his
return to France. But he especially wanted to share with Bounoure a
nice story about his son Pierre. Hardly fi ve and a half years old, and
barely able to read, Pierre was fascinated by Mallarmé and trying
to learn by heart the opening line of ‘Hérodiade’: ‘Abolished, and
her fearful wing in tears.’ In the United States, Pierre had already
fl attered himself on being able to give his occasional female student
childminders some help in interpreting Mallarmé:
So for a while, sometimes interrupting his games, he’s been
bringing a little chair and a little table into my study, asking
me to ‘pass over your Mallarmé’ and sitting there seriously,
opening the book always at the same page and wearing himself
out over the diffi culties of the same text, probably chosen for
its brevity: ‘A dream in a dream’! That being said, apart from
these little Mallarmean simperings, Pierre is a continuous
upwelling of poetry, sometimes quite incredible – and this for
us represents the miracle of the everyday.^64As for Derrida himself, in thrall to too many ‘petty tasks and
petty anxieties’, he dreamed ‘of distance, retirement, of a long,
uninterrupted period’. He felt that his social and professional life
was destroying his strength, and this vexed him all the more since
he could see no way out. On the invitation of Briec Bounoure, he
was to go to Brest on 23 May, to give a paper called ‘The library on
fi re’ (‘La bibliothèque en feu’) or, if preferable, ‘The library at stake’
(‘La bibliothèque en jeu’). He was mainly looking forward to seeing
Gabriel Bounoure again. But things turned out diff erently. The
old writer died on 23 April 1969, one month before this trip, which
thereupon lost its main raison d’être. Derrida had lost an important
conversation partner – one of the few in whom he could completely
confi de.