I hate seriousness. Through an engineer's serious concern there passes the whole world—with its inertia, its laws, its stubborn opacity. All serious thought is thickened by the world and coagulates: it's a resignation by man in favour of the world. See that man who shakes his head, saying: 'It's bad! It's very bad!', and try to understand what he puts into that head-shaking. It's this: that the world dominates man; that there were laws and rules to observe—all outside us, stratified, petrified—which would have given a favourable outcome; but those rules have been violated, the catastrophe has arrived and behold man without any recourse. For he no longer has any recourse in himself: he's 'of the world', the world has installed itself within him, and that violated taboo is violated also within him.

One is serious when one doesn't even envisage the possibility of leaving the world. When the world—with its alps and its rocks, its crusts and its oozes, its peatbogs and its deserts: all those obstinate immensities—holds one fast on every side. When one gives oneself the same type of existence as the rock: solidity, inertia, opacity. A serious man is a coagulated consciousness. One is serious when one denies mind. Those unbelievers Plato speaks of in the Sophist, who believe only in what they touch—they're ancestors of the spirit of seriousness. It goes without saying that the serious man, being of the world, doesn't have the least consciousness of his freedom; or rather, if he does have consciousness of it, in terror he buries it deep within him, like some filth. Like the rock, like the atom or like the star, he's determined. And if the spirit of seriousness is characterized by the application with which it considers the consequences of its acts, that's because, for it, all is consequence.

The serious man himself is merely a consequence—an unbearable consequence—never a principle. He's caught for all time in a serious of consequences, and sees only consequences without end. That's why money—sign of all the things in the world; consequence and of consequence—is the object par excellence of seriousness. In short, Marx posited the first dogma of seriousness when he asserted the priority of the object over the subject. And man is serious when he forgets himself; when he makes the subject into an object; when he takes himself for a radiation derived from the world: engineers, doctors, physicists, biologists are serious.

Well, I was protected against seriousness by what I've said. Too much so, rather than not enough. I wasn't of the world, because I was free and first beginning. It's not possible to grasp oneself as consciousness, without thinking that life is a game.

For what is a game, after all, but an activity of which man is the first origin: whose principles man himself ordains and which can have consequences only according to the principles ordained. But as soon as man grasps himself as free, and wishes to use his freedom, all his activity is a game: he's its first principle; he escapes the world by his nature; he himself ordains the value and rules of his acts, and agrees to pay up only according to the rules he himself has ordained and defined. Whence the diminished reality of the world and the disappearance of seriousness.

I have never wished to be serious—I felt too free. At the time of my love-affair with Toulouse, I wrote a long poem—extremely bad I imagine—entitled Peter Pan: song of the little boy who doesn't want to grow up. Always those 'little boys' and those 'little girls'—those clichés of our amorous relations! On the part of a sturdy fellow of twenty and a strapping girl of twenty-three, I find that as incestuous as Rousseau sighing out 'Mother!' all those times to Mme de Warens. But that's not my subject. In any case, that little boy didn't want to grow up for fear of becoming too serious. I could have set my mind at rest: I'm fourteen years older today and I've never been serious—except once, within the walls of the cemetery at Tetuán, because the Beaver wanted to make me put my straw hat on and I didn't want to. I've always claimed responsibility for my acts with the feeling of escaping them entirely by some other route. Because of consciousness's tower, into which I could ascend at will.

But the question which interests me today is the following: is authenticity, by walling up the door to the tower for ever more, going to reinstil in me the spirit of seriousness? I think there can be only one reply: No, by no means! For to grasp oneself as a person is quite the opposite of grasping oneself in terms of the world. And however authentic one is, one's still free—even freer than in the hypothesis of the tower—since one's condemned to a freedom without shadow and without excuse. And, after all, being-in-the-world isn't being of the world. It's even the opposite. Renouncing the ivory tower, I should like the world to appear to me in its full, threatening reality—but I do not, therefore, want my life to stop being a game. That's why I subscribe whole-heartedly to Schiller's phrase: 'Man is fully a man only when he plays.''