I found in The duty on Saturday, October 14, a faithful portrait of the grandeur and misery of the world. As usual, I start by reading the pages devoted to literature and ideas, for professional distortion, but above all to stock up on hope before exposing myself to the News which, with exceptions (like the death of a Hubert Reeves), replays the uninterrupted film of the small and big cowardices which keep humanity in mediocrity and violence. Could the reasons for hope today counter or delay those for despair? Let’s say that at first glance (Gaza, Ukraine) the fight was unequal and once again proved George Steiner right who deplored that culture had never prevented violence. Against “the fury of the world”, what could two or three novels, the eulogy of a deceased person, a few calls for peace and “the vigorous duty to doubt, to inform oneself and to contextualize” (Louise-Maude Rioux -Soucy)?
My day begins with a visit to Thoreau guided by Louis Hamelin who has always traveled the New World to prevent it from aging. His method is that of the turtle which moves around encased so that it can be both inside and outside. This is how Hamelin moves quite naturally from Mauricie to New England, from one era to another, because anyone who follows Thoreau’s advice (“look for a long time before succeeding in seeing”) cannot wander through space without being immediately drawn into time, without perceiving that everything that is born at each moment is, so to speak, a fragment of eternity. You can therefore be a courser de bois while living in Sherbrooke, because “time,” says Hamelin, “is the river in which I fish.” The title of this interview “A cabin, a lake, and a little eternity” describes the ideal journey of all thought which stops for a few moments to measure the distance which separates it from itself, as the forest reflects itself. in the lake. It is when the walker Hamelin withdraws into himself, into his cabin, for “crucifixion sessions on the keyboard” that he is confronted with the paradox of time, with “the extreme fixity of things that pass” (Virginia Woolf ), that he discovers that “the future is fixed, that it is we who are always moving in infinite space” (Rainer Maria Rilke).
I continue my reading with “The high-perched raft of Myriam Beaudouin”: to escape the announced end of humanity, the novelist finds refuge both in the Bible whose “beauty and depth” are inexhaustible and in “a black spruce, majestic, larger and stronger than the others, […] the tree of [son] father and [son] place of contemplation.” Here, as with Thoreau, of whom Hamelin reminds us that he read the Bhagavad-Gita, the rooting is done in space and time, in the sensitive and spiritual experience of the world, writing having no other goal than to ensure movement between top and bottom.
Beaudouin quotes Eckhart Tolle: “Escape is horizontal and peace is vertical.” Peace is not natural, humanity is always to be conquered, “it is up to the human being,” writes Reeves, “to establish acceptable standards of behavior, to remedy the inadequacies of nature [par] the consciousness which allows the meeting of beings; the recognition of the other as other”, because “at the level of humans nothing is going well in the “beautiful story” of the growth of cosmic complexity”. We have arrived at this point where we must expand or die, rediscover the moral law by inserting ourselves into this “secret relationship between the stars and humans” (Space takes the shape of my gaze).
The dialogue between Gérard Bouchard and Philippe Girard (“Correspondence on our impotence”) reminds us that this capacity to move from intelligence to consciousness, to connect with the other in whom we recognize our own strangeness, is not possible only through a sustained exchange between what we have been and what we want to become, between action and dream. To his young correspondent who said he did not recognize himself in Quebec, Bouchard replied that he could “learn to love Quebec” by finding in the past “that which could give him access to something greater”. In short, memory must sift through history and retain only what frees us. No future without the double duty of memory and forgetting: “We must demonstrate forgetting to be able to aspire to the lightness of being. And this forgetting is only nature that can whisper in our ears. » (Maya Ombasic, Falling upwards). In his posthumous collection, Jacques Brault evokes these “blessed moments” when the walker looks up towards Orion, “brilliant constellation which rejoices the heart and soothes it. And the world is then cleansed of its filth. There is joy in heaven and on earth. It feels good to exist without any justification. » (For ever).
On the front page: “The sun meets the moon”, “Gaza and the sad memory of Sabra and Chatila”, “Hubert Reeves has left to join the stars”. When will memory and forgetting meet again, when will humans meet somewhere other than in death?