“They sometimes say that we go back to childhood. This is perhaps what happened to me, now that I am free to no longer work,” suggests Robert Lalonde, adopting a posture that he recognizes as fundamental: that of the person who questions. As his latest notebooks appear, We are from his childhood, The duty met him by videoconference.
It would have been so much more captivating to find him in his new nest in North Hatley, which sets the poetic backdrop for his reflections, but the entire forest is there, in his eyes and in his words, ready to deliver its beauties: “C Nature is dizzying. It’s inconsistent. It is extraordinarily violent at times and incredibly gentle on other occasions. And it seems to me that we are made up just like that, so why do we have so much trouble accepting our inconsistencies, when nature doesn’t get in the way? » asks the author.
His words offer a summary of his notebooks, where the wandering of writing rediscovers the reflexes and state of mind of his “winding and eclectic childhood” to celebrate the ancestral wisdom of the living things that surround us. In a context of hyperconnectivity and urban sprawl, the proposal seems almost radical, and yet it is solar-friendly.
By reinstating the primacy of nature, where temporality is dictated by the rhythm of life and the cycle of the stars, Robert Lalonde inscribes the framework of his work in the humility of the great whole: “My writing engine draws on this will to bring to the fore the natural laws of existence which mean that we are not in control of much. And we, the writers, are not here to give lessons, but to question things. »
Childhood, an art of running away
The posture he adopts to question our anchoring in the world is that of childhood. Be careful though, even if the child is as tall as three apples, he holds him in high esteem: “I think that as a child, we already know who we are. We already know what binds us. Which could free us. What we don’t want. It’s difficult to live with, this discovery. And it’s even worse during adolescence. »
Moreover, even if he admits that his family gorged itself on nostalgia – “In our house, it was strong, the nostalgia. We were not born at the right time, in the right house and in the right place” — this is not the path he takes to return to his younger years: “It is not childhood with its places and photographic memories that animate me. I don’t return to these places, firstly because they have changed, often in a disastrous way, but above all because that’s not what interests me. I return to the spirit of childhood. This state of mind that I had and that I kept. »
To help us better understand this state of mind, he tells us about his first encounter with a tree: “I have a partly Mohawk upbringing, because my grandmother was Mohawk. So I was used, when I was little, to look at reality without the oversimplification that was made of it. My grandmother, when she saw me looking at a book that was supposed to teach me what a tree was – a school book, which indicated the name of each of its components – she threw it on the wall and stood me in front of a tree, telling me: “You’re going to spend the day there and you’re going to learn what it is. » I came back to school and said to the teacher: “I came across a tree. » And she replied to me: “You will start by going to wash your hands, your hands are dirty. » So let’s say I had a good start in life in refuting unusable abstractions. »
Childhood, he writes, “unites my end and my beginning. And I’m not debating the right to be there, to have been there, to be there again. » It was at this unnamed age that he grasped the beauty that surrounded him and the power to add his breath and his poetry to it. “I already knew, as a child, that I was not inhabiting a setting, but a vast dramaturgy of trees, beasts and light, truer than the so-called reality,” he writes again. Yes, Robert Lalonde’s theater, even far from the stage, is vibrant.
Wander through literary works
The writer received, last November, the Athanase-David prize, the highest distinction awarded by the government of Quebec crowning his entire career and his literary work, but a prize can never erase the vulnerability that runs through his creation: “Until the end, I have doubt riveted on the pleasure of writing. We work with doubt and encounter failure very often. »
Writing is a bushy path, but he recognizes the importance and richness of his wanderings and wandering: “Writing is perplexing, the reader must enter into a personal interrogation with the text, and not that we are giving him certainties. ” He sometimes wonders if he doesn’t reach his readership precisely because he “makes [lui]-even the admission of being someone who does not understand himself.”
From this humility tinged with a laughing irony, he admits to writing in perpetual dialogue with other writers: “I always travel with a lot of writers when I write. There are a lot of people who stop me from saying stupid things, because I make them speak for me and they often say things better than me. » A book is never just a book, and we clearly feel the love and complicity he has with the texts, in his way, in particular, of summoning Jack Kerouac, “an old comrade”.
Window open to the inexhaustible beauty of the world, free and liberated wanderings in the state of youth, We are from his childhood is also this literary dialogue which invites us to dive into an imaginary library. “My editor always tells me I quote too much,” he admits. Guilty pleasure or shared pleasure? The title of his notebooks is aptly taken from a passage from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, cited in emphasis: “We are from our childhood as we are from a country. »
If he recognizes that reading the notebooks “is a bit of a leap of faith”, he wonders if this break with linearity is not beneficial: “I think that it corresponds to the fragmented life that we all have and to which we try to give coherence. As we live, we try to make sense of things, but in reality, there is none. »
Meaning is what he would like to find in “our desire to be right about everything, to maintain our dangerous control over nature”. This is why, perhaps, “at this moment in history where we are ignoring that we are also animals”, he writes. Nothing is certain, but, he says, “if writing isn’t that, extracting a little hope…” His sentence remains in suspense, perched in the silence where we find a calm braided with uncertainties. And this is how the words become exhausted, or rather, they fade away to let nature regain its rights: “We both remain for a long time contemplating the apricot and plum hues of the sunset splashing the great mirror of the lake. »