They stole an hour from us last week and I’m still looking for it in the ticking seconds. It’s every spring (first time, primus tempus) the same story, I look at the clock and wonder where time has gone; I’m jetlagged. Paradoxically, I stretched the time, but I had to put my effort into it.
At the start of this leave, which we call “break time”, but where the activities are often stringent, I had a list as long as the line in front of La Banquise at 11 p.m. on Friday (Poutine time) of things to sort out. We all do that: a hole in the diary, immediately filled with “ to do “. Finally ! We’re going to get there, at the end of this damn list. Afterwards, we can… add other things. I call it the Dissatisfaction List.
In terms of satisfactions, I danced tango with my teacher from 30 years ago, drank water in a tiki bar with three twenty-somethings who wanted to know everything about the secret codes of tango, hydrated my sinuses in a hammam and hung frames on the walls. Three months that the executives were making eyes at me.
Then, I had a water heater installed by François and Mathieu (I was the 2e out of 13 in their day paid “on performance”), hung solar shades and curtains on the windows so as not to turn off the air conditioning in March (it seems that we are doing that in Quebec in 2024, misery…), picked up my documents ‘taxes because I don’t have a bank account in the Bahamas, and watched the geese come back, from the sky of my bed.
Not already ?
Well yes, already.
What was it like in Carolina?
It was just about Trump, might as well come back.
In my room, I have a small wicker goose hanging by a wire from the window, a totem received from my ex-neighbor from Saint-Armand, Sol, a Cree artist from Mistissini. I bought a small work from him, a drawing of a barnacle covered with glued shards of glass. Geese fascinate me. They are the metronomes of the seasons. They know when to break camp and come back for sugaring time. Soon, they will return on Valentine’s Day.
I miss Sol, who returned to live in Chibougamau. I loved this slowness hemmed with silence that he carried in his intimate fiber. Sol has been a good neighbor. He had plenty of time. They are the real revolutionaries.
I have the time. Nothing is more wonderful than having time. Time to do nothing. It is the greatest luxury on Earth.
A certain art of living
Learning to do nothing is an art, like housekeeping and decorative arts, all of which are underestimated. The last Laferrière is not entitled A certain art of living for nothing and it begins with “The art of living horizontally”. I have a weakness for horizontality, it is priceless. If you are a disciple of Pierre-Yves McSween, you will find that this is a bad quantity-price ratio: a third of the 135-page book is made up of blanks, of silences. That’s a lot of trees going silent.
Two-three sentences per page, like poetry, but in prose, space to rest the eyes. I read it backwards, then right side up, it’s the same. It reads any way. It is a relationship with time (and performance) which is at the same time the Caribbean rebel, the childhood which litters the ground and the old age which we can already glimpse through the window. And we still don’t know who Dany Laferrière is; I always have the impression that he’s taking advantage of us a little.
“Everything always goes too fast
even though I have plenty of time
Besides, I only have that and
it’s when you have nothing to do
that time is precious »
Where Laferrière teaches us to live is by saying “no” to almost everything. I embrace this wisdom slowly. She makes me happy.
“Today, at seventy, I say no to everything.
It took me almost half a century to regain the strength of character I had at the beginning. The power of no. Stand behind his refusal. Almost nothing that deserves a yes. Three or four things in a lifetime. Otherwise you have to answer no without any hesitation. »
Just for a few sentences, a book is worth reading. A pure writer. (And to the photographer: the bananas and tomatoes are too many on the cover; the glass of red was enough. The best is the enemy of almost nothing.)
He didn’t take my time as I feared, he gave me his.
At the end of nothing
I stopped time by doing nothing, refusing almost everything. I reread passages from the excellent guide The art of stopping time, written by urban monk Pedram Shojai. He explains that most of us trade our time for money. “It’s not great. This puts a monetary value on your time when it is a unit of measurement of your life. When your time is up, your life is over. It’s hard to put a value on it and, frankly, it’s even a little offensive. »
This is why time becomes more precious as we age and why we need to know how to say no. No one reimburses us for the time wasted doing things whose sole purpose is to dizzy ourselves, to stretch time or to receive medals, to flatter egos. This is the basis of capitalism: the more precious the resource, the more it is worth. We should be paid more when we are very old.
And there is only childhood and old age to change the relationship with time as the actor Marcel Sabourin does, staged by his filmmaker son in At the end of nothing (indoors). This liberating film puts everything into perspective and offers us quality time, from natural LSD to Sabourin sauce, capable of predicting the present, as he says. At 88 years old, Marcel reminds us that we can think outside of tracks and listen again to the tounes of Charlebois that he wrote on a corner of the table, for fun.
Ex-Professor Mandible (piiiit, piiiit, piiiit, I found it!) can talk about a tree or a plane and take you back to the silly fun of childhood.
But above all, it is capable of slowing down time and reconciling us with spontaneity. You know, this patent synonym of the present moment that you don’t find on any list?