The Disillusion of Not Being French

Alas, if only I had been French, I could have saved myself the disillusion, all my purposeless efforts, wasteful spending of weekends and evenings, under a silent reading lamp, quickly pulling my notebook from the table, leaving it balancing on my knees, and only now, after digging in intellectual mud for all these years, that I could have saved, do I realize the simplest of realizations, the thought that I should have started with if I would have only been, but now I have discovered it only at the end of my long journey, to come to the conclusion that it was all along so obvious, if only I had known. Of course, I knew, in a way, a disconnected way, I have known all the separate things to know, but I must have been utterly blind not to see the wholesome form, or what you ironically could call the Logos. Hell, the other, the world, the meaningless searching, the random attribution that was bound to be lost again, the homeless wanderer, the hunger, the importance of chance, all these flowing thoughts of consciousness that swell to the proportions of a river washing away old, established ideas, but they too get flooded by new ones, none remaining, nor leaving any soil for me to stand on myself, constantly grasping for the next thing, but only if I had seen the larger picture, from Heracleitus to Nietzsche to Derrida to myself, from Novalis to Strindberg to Celine to Le Clézio, from Homer to Freud. But now my life of Sisyphus and the feeling that I only now realize, and with every word, every sentence, again, the bubbling mud of sulphuric gases, every new release, another short lived word, it could all have made sense, if only I had been French.