In the era of liberation, shame doesn’t have a good press. And then there’s shame and its envoy, embarrassment. So, last night, I came across a Quebec reality TV show that had escaped me until now. It follows the “adventures” of a group of young students living together. In this episode, two young girls were trying to find their lecture hall at the University of Montreal. (Spoiler alert: they find it.)
I would have needed a trigger warning : it bothered me. At their age, I had tried unsuccessfully to find the UQAM building on De La Gauchetière where my first university class was held. I was so stressed that I had walked past it without realizing it, and now late for class, panicked, I had gone home without telling anyone. Shame.
The next day, I left early to make sure I found it. There were no smartphones for intense young people like me back then. (By the way, two years later, I saw a shrink. Since it was shameful to “seek,” there was no waiting list. Ironically. As for me, I’m doing better, even if I sometimes write articles for the newspaper.)
There was no technical team to capture every minute of my “adventure,” no reality TV to help me identify with this “experience” and validate it, no social networks to post my dismay, and who knows, be shamed. No reality TV, but TV, with soap operas that aren’t very exciting, but still: I don’t remember that, in The ShepherdsSteve Fiset was driving home to his parents in his Camaro to complain to Rita Bibeau about not having found his lecture hall. I don’t think he went to university either, but it’s all a bit fuzzy in my memory.
A few days ago, a city councilor reported in the media his shame at the extreme filth of his city as a bus passed by with tourists holding their noses because of the nauseating smells of the abundant waste where the bus had stopped. Welcome to Montreal.
In the morning when the weather is nice, I go to read in a park near my home in Outremont, and I have developed the habit of bringing a bag to pick up the trash that litters the lawns, on and around the tables and benches. Shame, once again, but shame for those who come there and leave these traces of their incivility, who do not take care, who come to screw up the common right to see beauty, “to feel through the sense of sight how this environment carries us, inspires us, supports us, and solicits our care in return.” (Cynthia Fleury and Antoine Fenoglio, What cannot be stolenGallimard/Tracts.)
Maybe the young caquistes will make proposals on this? The same channel also proposed a discussion on social networks (the place where the shaming) and establishing digital rules for young people. Of course there are downsides to progress, but if I understand correctly, limiting the creativity of our young “content creators” would be inappropriate. There was also talk of the hard drug of likes and the social status of the digital world, the fear of being absent from it (otherwise, we flirt with the status of rejection, therefore permanent shame), content creators influencers who have followers.
Nothing new in this, but I will stop here on the words: a follower, In the days of soap operas, he was a follower. Parents didn’t want to be told that their child was impressionable, which was alarming, because then who would he follow and end up in what scam?
Finally, I was looking at the articles on the literary rentrée, and I wondered why, as the son of a BS who worked as a maid in a bourgeois residence in my neighborhood in the late 1930s, I can’t really feel the now very fashionable shame of the class defectors who occupy the media and the top of the sales charts. Why shouldn’t I write Prince Albert Streettelling the story of Pointe-Aux-Trembles Street, where we lived, not far from where Serge Bouchard lived, and my move to the chic Bernard Street?
It is true that I am only a bookseller, so my “success” is quite relative, even if I live almost fraudulently in a neighborhood beyond my means where temporary immigrant workers regularly arrive to clear our driveways, mow our lawns or blow our dead leaves. I always give them a friendly smile. But I am ashamed.
This morning, shame landed on the front page of my daily newspaper: “What if we let the caribou disappear?” I won’t write Prince Albert Streetbut I make it a point to quote Romain Gary, still him, who, in an interview about his novel The Roots of Heaven and the defense of African elephants, argued for a “human margin.” Replace “elephants” with “caribou” and listen to Gary:
“We must be guided […] by the concern to preserve a margin of safety where there would always be enough room for a certain minimum of the human that would protect us both from our errors and from our truths. I chose elephants, because these gigantic beasts gave a good image of these clumsy and difficult to protect values at the heart of the modern ideological melee: freedom of thought, human rights, tolerance, and a certain inviolability of the human. These rights […] are presented to us today as anachronisms from a bygone political era that we can no longer bother with in our march towards progress. In short, elephants.” (“Romain Gary: men, these elephants”, The expressJanuary 4, 1957.)