I say this without boasting, quite simply because it is true: I am driven by an insatiable quest for knowledge. I would like, in the field of intellectual knowledge, to know everything. I know it’s impossible, but my desire to get closer to this goal stimulates me every day and makes me happy.
I don’t understand those who say they want to put their brains into off from time to time. Mine is at we constantly – it tires those around me, in fact -, not only when I read serious books, but also when I listen to hockey or soap operas. I want to understand and find meaning, so I analyze and dig. It doesn’t exhaust me; it energizes me.
We will understand, in these conditions, why I love my job as a columnist for Quebec essays so much for more than twenty-five years. I read all these books, with the aim of commenting on them, as I breathe: because I need to.
So I find myself in excellent company in What it means to know (Septentrion, 2024, 198 pages), a collective work under the direction of sociologist Guillaume Lamy. Twenty-six scientists from various backgrounds tell us, in a few pages, “the effects that knowledge has had on their lives”. Published on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the TV and web channel Savoir Média, where Lamy is a host, this book is a celebration of life with thought.
Psychologist Rachida Azdouz sums up one of the paradoxes of knowledge well. On the one hand, it gives power, pleasure and freedom; on the other, it can be “a source of suffering and disenchantment”. The more we know, in fact, the more we realize that we know so little of everything there is to know.
When we have left the cave of ignorance, we are also often inhabited by the desire to share our enlightenment with others, who sometimes prefer to remain in reassuring darkness. Being human, Azdouz nevertheless concludes, nevertheless comes with the requirement “to learn to be a person capable of projecting meaning onto the world and thinking about one’s relationship with one’s fellow human beings and with other species, beyond the struggles aimed at ensuring its own survival.
Projecting meaning onto the world can obviously involve various disciplines. The literary Catherine Mavrikakis thus speaks of the “knowledge of the night” which she draws from her dreams and her psychoanalytic experience. This knowledge, she says, is not due to “an acquisition of knowledge”, but to the awareness of a necessary “self-distrust”, which is the condition of an “ethical ideal of fragility stated […] ideal basis of all authentic life.
Nor does such a life go without a quest for origins. Historian Myriam Wojcik thus evokes her powerful desire to know the story of her father, a Polish Jew who lost half of his family in the death camps and another part in the Stalinist USSR.
Died in 1996, taking with him the secret of his journey, the historian’s father left her orphaned by her Jewish heritage, which she wishes to rediscover to pass it on to her sons, to let them know that they are both Here, from Quebec ancestors, and there, from a persecuted but admirable people. Going back to the source in this way is “celebrating life,” she writes.
The source of the essayist Mathieu Bélisle is the Bible. Son of a Protestant pastor, the writer spent his adolescence engaging in comparative analyzes of various versions of the Bible. He then moved away from this universe in order to study literature, only to finally realize that deep down, in doing so, he was pursuing the same work, that of understanding the human condition by interpreting great texts.
The essays contained in this work are beautiful because they show how knowledge profoundly enriches the lives of those who engage with it intensely. This is the case of the Acadian sociolinguist Annette Boudreau, who understood, by reading Pierre Bourdieu, that she did not have to be ashamed of her language, that the derogatory judgments that are too often reserved for linguistic variation do not say not much about the condemned language but a lot about the ignorance of the censors.
You should read the historian Éric Bédard, who says he learned from his master François Furet to write elegantly, to think with a critical distance and not to expect politics to achieve paradise on earth. You should read the sociologist Joseph Yvon Thériault, who rehabilitates popular knowledge in his discipline. You should read the fiery physicist Normand Mousseau, who reiterates “that scientific ethics requires us to take an oath of infidelity to political groups”. You must read this entire wonderful essay, which makes you want to know even more.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.