Odile, my wonderful friend. It was a joy to read you every week, to embrace your oblique view of the arts and the world, to salute your immense culture, to savor your exemplary love of language and the elegance of your style.
The end of Odile Tremblay’s chronicles marks for me a historic passage for The duty and for the journalistic world. And I weigh each word of this last sentence. There are few other writer-journalists with such knowledge of literature, philosophy and cinema. Your texts have made us better. They made us grow.
This Saturday’s column, which was intended to be your last, provoked in me much more than the end of a pleasant habit, it provoked real sadness and the realization of the end of an era. The one where knowledge was not considered elitist but necessary, the one where tradition called the present into question, the one where the philistines, lacking any knowledge, did not invite themselves to comment on everything and its opposite, did not did not invent a culture in canceling another one.
Since 1990, you have taught us the perspective of things, argumentation, dialectics. Never abrasive, but deeply honest. Where others used pithy sentences, you transformed everything into fine questions.
Without revealing any indiscretion, I can now reveal that we have been friends for a long time and it’s good to be proud of your friends. You had been wondering for some time if you still had any relevance, or even if there was still a readership for your writings, and you told me, in the same breath, that you were thinking of leaving the stage for a bit.
Dear Odile, you have a host of loyal readers, a cohort of writers, filmmakers, thinkers, literati, men and women of the living arts from all over the world that you have brought to light. Here we are all a little orphaned.
I know your love of books and I know that they are here right now to lull you with happiness.
My dear friend, thank you for everything.