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The TV set is still sitting in the living room, dark and forsaken. I haven’t touched it since. I’m sure it still works. I could find out with a touch of the button. It’s a standard model, sitting on a lacquered wooden stand made up of two elements, a shelf and a pedestal, the pedestal in the form of a thin black book, upright and open, like a silent reproach. The screen is an indefinable color, dark and uninviting, I wouldn’t call it green, and very slightly convex. On one side a little compartment houses the various controls. An antenna sprouts from the top, its two stems making a V, a bit like the twin antennae of a crayfish, and offering the same sort of handle for anyone who might want to pick it up and drop it into a pot of boiling water to rid himself of it even more completely.

I spent the summer alone in Berlin. Delon, whom I live with, went off to Italy on vacation with the two children, my son and the not-yet-born baby we were expecting—a little girl, in my opinion. I assumed it was a little girl because the gynecologist couldn’t find a male member on the sonogram (and when there’s no male member, it’s often a little girl, I’d explained).

Not that television ever held an especially important place in my life. No. On average, I watched maybe two hours a day (maybe less, but I’d rather err on the side of generosity, and not try to puff myself up with a virtuously low estimate). Apart from major sporting events, which I always watched with pleasure, and of course the news and the occasional election-night special, I never watched much of anything on television. As a matter of principle and pleasure, I never watched movies on television, for instance (just as I don’t read books in Braille). For that matter, although I never tried it, I was always quite sure that I could give up watching television anytime, just like that, without suffering in the least, without the slightest ill effect—in short, that there was no way I could be considered dependent.

And yet, over the previous few months, I’d noticed a slight deterioration in my day-to-day habits. I spent most afternoons at home, unshaved, dressed in a wonderfully comfortable old wool sweater, watching television for three or four hours at a stretch, half-reclining on the couch, taking it easy, a little like a cat in its bed, my feet bare, my hand cradling my privates. Just being myself, in other words. Thus, this year, unlike years past, I followed the French Tennis Open on television from beginning to end. At first it was only a match here and there, but then, with the quarterfinals, I began to take a real interest in the outcome, or so I explained to Delon to justify my long inactive afternoons in front of the set. Most of these afternoons I was alone in the apartment, but sometimes the cleaning woman was there too, ironing my shirts beside me in the living room, mute with contained indignation. On the worst days, the broadcasts started at noon and didn’t end until after nightfall. I emerged from those sessions nauseous and numbed, my mind empty, my legs limp, my eyes bleary. I went off and took a shower, letting the warm water pour over my face for many minutes. I was wiped out for the rest of the evening, and, however reluctant I was to admit it, there was no getting around the face that, ever since I’d very gradually begun to turn forty years old, I was no longer physically up to five sets of tennis.

Apart from that I did nothing. By doing nothing, I mean doing nothing impulsive or mechanical, nothing dictated by habit or laziness. By doing nothing, I mean doing only the essential, thinking, reading, listening to music, making love, going for walks, going to the pool, gathering mushrooms. Doing nothing, contrary to what people rather simplistically imagine, is a thing that requires method and discipline, concentration, an open mind. I swim five-hundred meters every day nowadays, at a rate of two kilometers per hour, a leisurely pace I admit, equaling exactly twenty pool-lengths every fifteen minutes, which is to say eighty pool-lengths in an hour. But high performance isn’t my goal. I swim slowly, like an old woman (albeit without the bathing-cap), my mind ideally empty, focused on my body and its movement, carefully observing my motions and their timing, my mouth half-open as I exhale, blowing a spray of little lapping bubbles over the surface. Afloat in the blue-tinged pool, my limbs surrounded by limpid water, I slowly reach forward and push the water behind me with long strokes, my knees drawing level with my hips; then, as my arms slowly extend once more, my legs simultaneously push the water behind them in one coordinated and synchronized movement. In the end, I rank swimming very highly among the pleasures that life has to offer us, having in the past somewhat underestimated it and placed it rather far behind physical love, which was until now my favorite activity, apart from thinking, of course. I do in fact very much like making love (on more than one account), and, without going into my own personal style in that domain, which is in any case closer to the sensual quietude of a leisurely outburst of a four-hundred meter butterfly race, I will say above all that making love brings me an immense inner equilibrium, and that, the embrace at an end, as I lie dreamily on my back on the soft sheets, savoring the simple companionship of the moment, I find myself in an irrepressible good mood, which appears on my face as a slight, unexpected smile, and something gleaming in my eye, something light-hearted and knowing. And it turns out that swimming brings me the same sort of satisfaction, that same bodily plenitude, slowly spreading to the mind, like a wave, little by little, giving birth to a smile.

And so I realized, busy as I was doing nothing, that I no longer had time to watch television.