The Sack Season

The Sack Season

I spit on my life. I want nothing to do with it.
Who does no better than his life?

It began when I was a child. There was a big cumbersome adult.
     How to get revenge on him? I put him in a sack. There I could beat him at my leisure. He cried out but I didn't listen. He wasn't interesting.
     I sensibly kept this childhood habit. I don't trust the possibilities for intervention one learns as an adult, and besides, they don't work very well.
     You don't offer a chair to someone in bed.
     This habit, I say, I've kept it and until today kept it a secret. It was safer.
     Its disadvantage—for there is one—is that because of it, I have too much tolerance for impossible people.
     I know that I'm waiting for them with the sack. It's something that teaches extraordinary patience.
     I allow ridiculous situations to drag on and I dawdle about my life-blockers.
     The joy I would feel in throwing them out the door in reality is withheld at the moment of action by the incomparably greater delights of soon putting them into the sack. Into the sack where I beat them with impunity and with an enthusiasm to surpass ten robust men methodically taking turns.
     Without this little art of mine, how would I have spent my depressing life, often poor, always under the elbows of others?
     How would I have been able to carry on for decades through so many tribulations, under so many masters, near or far, through two wars, two long occupations by an armed people who believe in knocking down bowling pins, against other innumerable enemies?
     But this liberating habit saved me. Barely, it's true, and I resisted the despair that seemed bound to leave me nothing. The nonentities, the bores, a brute I could have freed myself from a hundred times over: I set them aside for the sack session.


—Translated by Darren Jackson


From Life in the Folds by Henri Michaux (Wakefield Press, 2016). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the translator.