On that evening, upon returning from a convivial, warm but equally disappointing dinner with friends, a great weariness had come over him and, for a time he sought not to measure, he had remained prostrate in his large armchair, as old and decrepit as himself, in the solitary apartment where the half-light of that sad autumn evening was gaining on him.

This solitude, which paralyzed him to the point of feeling as if he couldn't move any part of his fatigued body, he felt as never before. It was one with what he could perceive of his physical immobility, terribly present and overwhelming.

Body and mind wandered in the unreal presence of an elsewhere in which all those distant episodes of a life that was coming to an end reappeared. A bit, as the legend goes, like those last moments before entering a country from which one never returns, during which one relives, in a sort of accelerated film, all the episodes of one's life.

He had always been lonely since his earliest childhood, without having sought it out, without it being the product of circumstances which, although sometimes turbulent, were never tragic, without him ever really having suffered from it. He had always, in these moments, as varied as they were unexpected, somehow gone on, trying to resolve what he could perceive of this monetary solitude by a leap forward that created the impression that it would remain behind him. But in the end, it would catch up with him through some detour in life, and he had little reason to think that the same would not be true of his latest folly, to which he clung desperately, and in which he placed so many hopes of finally finding at least at the end of his life that total communion which would have meant that he would no longer, truly, be alone.

From his childhood and adolescence, it was all those moments of solitude that popped up like disordered flashes. He had been a loner in that school, far from the other children of the village, distanced by the respect due to the “teacher's son”. He had also been a boy lost in the games of three girls, his sisters, games that had faded as he grew older. Lonely he had been in his passion to be useful in the difficulties of the crisis, while spontaneously undertaking odd jobs that isolated him all the more because he didn't fully understand the reason for them. His loneliness was even more difficult to bear when, at the age of twelve, he accidentally caught his mother having sex with a lover. This suddenly thrust him into a world he didn't understand, all the more so as his mother, desperate to give him any explanation, walled him up even more in incomprehensible silence and secret complicity. This further accentuated the privileged emotional relationships that had been locked away on both sides and never opened up.

Lonely in those first years of middle school, when he found himself alone in the village, leading the hard life of a long commute and a studious will, which meant that those three years of adolescence distanced him even further from the milieu of boys and girls his age. He was even lonelier at the start of the war, when he found himself in Paris studying technical subjects, while a lack of money (he made it a principle to spend as little as possible, conscious of his parents' sacrifice) prevented any “outings” with boys or girls from the school he was attending, his only social environment at the time.

Even more lonely was the long road to exodus, where, cut off from his family, he found himself for three months at the age of seventeen, having to decide on everything, with no support, only helpful people he knew little about.

If all this history had already reinforced his propensity to accept this loneliness to the point where it had become something like second nature, the illness - tuberculosis - which took him down when he was still seventeen, meant that for several years, until the end of the war, even though he had returned to his family environment, he had to fight against a social loneliness generated by the prejudices surrounding this illness. If he had to fight to overcome this ostracism and physically and socially reclaim his place in the sun, even though he was passionately supported by his mother, he had to do it alone, and this must have had a profound influence on his combative temperament, reinforcing his tendency to act alone and take solitary initiatives on impulse.

The rest of his working life, right up to the present day, bears witness to this. On the one hand, in all his reflections on what he experienced, there was a constant emphasis on his own thoughts and conclusions, a sort of refusal to apply schemes or conclusions from any other source, even if his thinking took paths already traced by others. On the other hand, his social activity - be it political or trade-union - was all imbued with this desire for independent, solitary thought - and consequently action. If he was ever involved in groups, it was either in a kind of marginal way, or as the main organizer. These two positions, even when assumed and claimed as collective acts, were both in fact a kind of isolation. He might even think, rightly or wrongly, that he was the only one to think or act in this way, or worse, that he was - in the worst kind of isolation - the essential link in the collective in which he participated. Even though, paradoxically, he could recognize that he could not have assumed this role without the support of all the members of the collective, which was both true and false.

He had often wondered why, when he was close to certain political currents, no one had invited him to become militant, as if the leaders of these collectives had guessed that he was always playing solo and wouldn't have been the good little soldier one might have expected. He also had to add that, knowing his own limitations, out of pride or fear, he had never sought to enter into the constraints of such organizations. If he had been able to participate as a member in certain political groups or a trade union, he had quickly become the black sheep, acting more in isolation (with others eventually, but again being the leader) and isolating himself from the bulk of the troops. Even if he stubbornly continued to take part in perisyndical activities in the workplace, he often found himself alone in the vicissitudes of the struggles, albeit with the sympathy of many, to such an extent that the label his opponents gave his efforts was that of “Simon's gang”. Was a gang leader ever anything other than a lone wolf, abandoned to his solitude when things went wrong?

He came to wonder whether, in his emotional, family or love life, this loneliness hadn't sometimes led him to attitudes that were almost incomprehensible unless they could be linked to the proud assertion of solitude. He remembered precise details of his life when he had asserted his isolation in a kind of unconscious gesture that set him apart from the attitude considered normal. Wouldn't this have been at the same time a kind of inner glorification of his self, somewhat contemptuous of all the others present in this event? He remembered that during the war, when the father of the man who was to become his elder sister's husband had come to ask for her hand in marriage (because he was a former farmer who observed bourgeois traditions), he had, driven by a sudden impulse, hidden in the attic behind some trunks so that he wouldn't be found and avoid all the ceremony. To this day, he still doesn't know what could have driven him to this solitary act given that he was no longer a child: he was twenty at the time.

He also remembered, much later, a similar gesture at his mother's funeral. At the cemetery, as the coffin was lowered into the grave and family and friends gathered for the final farewell, he broke away from the group and stood totally apart, in a somewhat dramatic gesture of isolation, as if he were the only one suffering more than anyone else. He had never been sure whether this spontaneous and totally unpremeditated gesture could be linked to that not only privileged but also secret relationship with his mother; but it could just as easily be interpreted as a proud assertion of the same nature, albeit different from what was already developing in his union and political activities.

A host of other thoughts of the same order were racing through his mind at the mention of his emotional and love relationships. If he had refused all ephemeral relationships, even though he might have been strongly solicited or felt a strong attraction himself, claiming that he wouldn't find any satisfaction in them, wasn't it rather because he wanted to preserve his superb isolation and thus remain the uncontested master of his solitary life? This led him to wonder whether, in his relationships with his partners, he had not, consciously or unconsciously, in asserting his innate or developed ego, also been the solitary dominant, wallowing in ignorance of what the other was, even though in the reality of everyday life he could claim to practice total equality. This was true in material terms, but certainly not in terms of emotional relationships.

This is how he arrived at his present situation. If loneliness sometimes weighed on him, as it did at the time, wasn't it because he could no longer, given his age and the end of his life, move forward as he always had in the past in order to mask a solitude with another collective or another affair, even if it meant reproducing exactly the same situation shortly afterwards? If he was currently suffering from the situation in which he was trying to find this perfect communication with another privileged relationship - which would have been the unexpected end of this solitude - wasn't it because of this impossibility that had accompanied him throughout his life?

He had no one to blame but himself. But could he even do that?

All this came in waves as he lay motionless, prostrate in his old armchair. It was as if what he was experiencing at the moment, which he wanted to maintain ardently and sometimes clumsily (a product of his solitary pride), would not withstand this kind of schizophrenia between the unconscious affirmation of his solitude and the imperious need to get out of it. A kind of despair that nailed him lifeless, torn between hope and incomprehension. He couldn't shake off the thought that things would turn out as he'd hoped (her haunting presence in his thoughts encouraged him to do so), but at the same time, as he brooded over his past, he couldn't help but feel a kind of anguish at finding himself alone again, due to this very thing he'd been carrying around for so long without escaping.

The old lone wolf suffered from it, but it would come to an end anyway.

Henri Simon 2017