Free Hygiene and the Assassin by Amélie Nothomb Page A

only excuse is his pleasure. A writer who does not have pleasure is as disgusting as some bastard raping a little girl without even getting his rocks off, just for the sake of raping, to commit a gratuitously evil act.”
    â€œThere’s no comparison. Writing is not as harmful.”
    â€œYou obviously don’t know what you’re saying, because you haven’t read me—how could you know? Writing fucks things up at every level: think of the trees they’ve had to cut down for the paper, of all the room they have to find to store the books, the money it costs to print them, and the money it will cost potential readers, and the boredom the readers will feel on reading them, and the guilty conscience of the unfortunate people who buy them and don’t have the courage to read them, and the sadness of the kind imbeciles who do read them but don’t understand a thing, and finally, above all, the fatuousness of the conversations that will take place after said books have been read or not read. And that’s just the half of it! So don’t go telling me that writing is not harmful.”
    â€œBut you can’t totally rule out the possibility of encountering one or two readers who really will understand you, even if it’s only intermittently. Don’t those flashes of deep complicity with a handful of individuals suffice to make reading a beneficial act?”
    â€œNonsense! I don’t know if those individuals exist, but, if they do, they are the ones who can be most harmed by what I write. What do you think I talk about in my books? Maybe you think I describe how good human beings are, how happy they are to be alive? How the devil did you come up with the idea that to understand me will make someone happy? On the contrary!”
    â€œBut complicity, even in despair—is that not a pleasant thing?”
    â€œDo you think it’s pleasant to find out that you are just as desperate as your neighbor? I think it makes things even sadder.”
    â€œIn that case, why write? Why even seek to communicate?”
    â€œCareful, don’t mix up the two: writing is not seeking to communicate. You ask me why I write, and this is what I’d say, strictly and exclusively: for pleasure. In other words, if there is no pleasure, one must stop, imperatively. It so happens that writing brings me pleasure—well, it used to—so much pleasure I could die. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea. Moreover, every theory that has tried to explain pleasure has been more inane than the next one. One day, a very serious man told me that when you felt pleasure in making love, it was because you were creating life. Can you imagine? As if there could be pleasure in creating something as bad and ugly as life! And then, that would imply that if a woman is taking the pill, she should no longer feel pleasure because she’s no longer creating life. But this fellow really believed his theory! In short, don’t ask me to explain why writing gives me pleasure: it’s a fact, that’s all.”
    â€œAnd what has the hand got to do with all this?”
    â€œThe hand is the source of pleasure in writing. And it’s not the only one: writing also brings pleasure to one’s belly, one’s sex, one’s forehead, and one’s jaws. But the most specific pleasure is located in the hand that writes. It’s a difficult thing to explain: when it is creating what it needs to create, the hand trembles with pleasure and becomes an organ of genius. I don’t know how many times while writing I have had the strange impression that my hand was in charge, sliding across the page all alone, without asking the brain its opinion. Oh, I know that no anatomist could accept such a thing, and yet very often that is what you feel. It is such a voluptuous moment, probably not unlike what a horse feels when it bolts, or a prisoner when he escapes. Which leads to another conclusion: is there