«Qu'est-ce qu'un homme révolté?» —Camus

It was one of those brooding moods a seventeen-year-old often finds himself in when he realizes that young men in other places are perhaps scaling craggy sheer faces of mountains or leading Communist insurrections in the third world.

One begins to feel inadequate.

The French word for seventeen is dix-sept.

At seventeen I wanted to run through Tom Wolfe autumn pyres of leaves—dance like Roethke poems and take Marcel Proust walks along improbable avenues. Un apprimé est la victime d'un oppresseur. I wanted to drive fast cars and seduce whispering women from made-up places. I wanted to have long, stilted conversations about politics with effete bourgeoisie in fusty parlours. I wanted to accuse, to speak in tongues and to seek enlightenment from an ascetic mountaintop yogi. I wanted to produce volumes of prose that spoke like keys to the hearts of people everywhere. I wanted to save the world, petit à petit, by teaching people how to love.

These were my juvenile fantasies.

I am seventeen and I knew everything in the world worth knowing.

I'm coming upon the end of my childhood (mon enfance). Ma naïveté de la jeunesse is fading. I know not who I am or what I want, save two things:

I want to be different (vive le différent!)

I want to start a revolution (vive la révolution!)