Dinner with Antoine

I asked Antoine last night if he thought I had a big ego. 

We'd been talking about Jacques R, his dear friend, a French poet with whom he'd recently done a book--Antoine's drawings and Jacques' poems. "Jacques has a big ego," Antoine remarked. He said it in a way someone would say, "so and so has a big nose" or "so and so has small feet" as a matter of plain fact, as if in fact Jacques's ego was an observable physical quality.

I found this interesting, having never thought of a person's ego this way, having known many, too many people, men and women, of whom I'd say, "they have a big ego" but never thinking of the ego, as big as it might be, as a discernible fact in the way a person's eyes are blue or ears are big or nose is red and so forth.

We were at dinner, Antoine and I, with our wives, drinking vodka martinis and talking, in a restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Flocks of pelicans kept flying by in the late evening sky, giving the evening a prehistoric glow. I thought to myself, maybe there was a time when human beings had no egos.

Antoine lives in a village in rural France. He's a Spaniard who was born and raised in Oran, northwest Algeria. I don't know that I've ever met a more self-assured, confident human being who says things like, "I know nothing," or "I'm ambivalent" and who means it. Antoine seems to be charmed by ambivalence, by indirection, and would follow these instincts to the end of the earth. We've discussed this many times, our varying degrees of being able to tolerate, even welcome this sense of not-knowing, of being mystified, and how it plays into the making of art.

At some point during our dinner I asked Antoine if he thought I had a big ego, already knowing the answer.