Georges Simenon

"On the one hand, I cannot recognize myself in the young man I then was, and, on the other, I feel as if it were yesterday. I am sometimes shocked by the idea that a life can produce so little, can pass almost without leaving any trace.

At eighteen, or twenty, when I was still given to daydreaming, I constructed a little personal theory, which was neither scientific nor philosophical, but which fascinated me.

From a physics lesson, I gathered that a certain exchange takes place between bodies that come into contact with one another; that friction, for instance, leaves its mark on objects.

So I imagined that we leave our mark on the places through which we pass during our lives, somewhat the way game leaves a trail, which dogs recognize by sniffing the air. But not a smell—a different sort of trail, or, rather, a succession of ghosts, drifts of ectoplasm."


The Man With the Little Dog by Georges Simenon
Harcourt Brace: San Diego, 1989 (first published 1964)
Page 79