You take a final tour of the deserted house. The echo of your footsteps meets that of your memories. The moment is bittersweet.
You would like to understand what is tightening your throat, but you cannot untangle the emotions that are intertwined. Each time, the batch of boxes comes with a slight dizziness. You must sort out your life, consciously choosing to keep and to leave. You know that this ending leads to new possibilities, but you also know that starting again could disappoint you. Between excitement and fear, you don’t know which way to dance.
The great thing is that a girl who writes in The Press read an essay on the subject and couldn’t resist the urge to quote several passages in a column. These extracts from Changes of address: a philosophy of moving allowed you to better understand your emotional maelstrom.
You first learned that in his essay published by Éditions de l’Aube in 2022, Thibaut Sallenave conceives of the inhabited place as “a reserve of lived time and imagined future”. It made you think.
It’s true, when you put your boxes here, you had plans. Then, routine rubbed shoulders with fantasies… Perhaps you are disappointed with the years spent in these places or rather grateful to have been able to drop off there. In any case, when you take a final tour of the home, it is much more than a series of empty rooms that you observe, it is a deeply inhabited absence. “The walls keep traces of the paintings, the discoloration of the paintings or the floor reveals by contrast the volume of the furniture now absent,” writes Thibault Sallenave.
Everything indicates a life about to leave, a life already elsewhere and which is gradually exhausted in the vestiges it leaves, like footsteps fading on the sand or like the armchair that has been occupied for a long time gradually cools.
Thibaut Sallenave, author
Your past is a ghostly presence that now invades the vacated space. And not only memories come back, but also doubts or remorse. You think that you could have lived in this place differently, made other choices, lived a different existence there. Hello, melancholy.
“Who am I, in this empty apartment where my whole life has just been loaded into a moving vehicle? continues the philosopher. Not “nobody”, of course. But a being waiting. A being whose existence is reduced to the literality of this exteriority to oneself, and who can only temporarily hold on to his memories, his projects, and a few things carried in a travel bag. »
We feel small when we only hold on to a few boxes. At the same time, perhaps you experience a certain euphoria. Soon, you will move into a space that will allow you to reinvent yourself… “It’s not yet [v]our place of life, but it is already the address of a possible life,” writes Thibaut Sallenave nicely.
PHOTO ALEX POTEMKIN, GETTY IMAGES
“We feel small when we only hold on to a few boxes,” explains our columnist.
Far from romanticism, it underlines at the same time that we can idealize the renewal of moving. Are you heading to the countryside to free yourself from the tightness of the city? Are you moving to a new location to live in a fashionable neighborhood? Have you found a cabin that better reflects your values or a nest to heal your wounds? Very good, but your habits risk becoming anchored in your daily life, regardless of the walls that protect you. Sometimes the new beginning is just an illusion.
In the meantime, the “in-between places” of moving, as the philosopher calls it, plunges you into a certain discomfort. He asks you to deconstruct yourself in order to reweave yourself elsewhere. It’s exhausting.
Especially since when you push open the door of your new home, in a moment, another form of unease will grip you: “Because the imprint of those who occupied it for a long time, or on the contrary the atmosphere of a place that has long been deserted, inevitably awakens the perception of a powerful strangeness,” believes Thibaut Sallenave.
The author even associates this new space to inhabit with a “power that must be tamed”. It sounds intense, but you will quickly recognize it by the enigmatic sounds of the first night, the objects forgotten by the previous tenants, the walls which will dictate the way in which you must place your furniture…
Luckily, this isn’t your first rodeo. You know that all power can be tamed. Whether this move is desired or not, one morning you will see the dust floating in a ray of light and you will feel at home.
When you close the door behind you, saying goodbye to empty rooms loaded with a part of your life, you understand that the emotions that inhabit you have every reason in the world to exist. As mixed as they are.
After all, you’re changing chapters and you’re human.
Changes of address: a philosophy of moving
Dawn
239 pages