On apprend, souvent trop tard pour lui en parler, un épisode de sa vie qu’un proche vous a caché. Est-ce qu’il vous l’a vraiment caché ? Il l’a oublié, ou plutôt, avec le temps, il n’y pense plus. Ou, tout simplement, il ne trouve pas les mots.
Patrick Modiano – Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier
Memory is a sacred temple and a unique experience of human existence. Each imprint of lasting impact and due importance illuminates a candle in the soul and in the mind that burns slowly, shedding soft rays of light on those obscure corners that would otherwise be shrouded in darkness. Oftentimes it brings clarity by creating distance and disengagement, it mellows and refines the hard edges carved by pain. But memory just as well plays tricks of shadows, like the candle whose flimsy flickering is directed by occasional gusts of breath of our willingness – or rather the lack of it – to come to terms with events of the past that shaped our perception of the world, and consequently of ourselves. There is the twisting and turning, an anguished attempt to fit a pulsating fibre into a cold, lifeless template of rigid shape; there is a fine line between grasping and letting go, between that which is enlarged and that which remains in the blurried perception of distance.
There is no truth to be found in the past; by its very definition, past is deprived of the ability to provide the one relief that could bring comfort to the present; there is only the deepening dusk covered by a thin layer of mist closing in on the helpless figure searching for answers where they cannot be found.
C’était comme s’il allait lui dévoiler le secret de ses origines, toutes ces années du début de la vie que l’on a oubliées, sauf un détail qui remonte parfois des profondeurs, une rue que recouvre une voûte de feuillage, un parfum, un nom familier mais dont vous ne savez plus à qui il appartenait, un toboggan.
Patrick Modiano – Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier
Modiano’s prose is like a dance in a mist of time and memory with layers overlapping, thickening and unfolding again just to trickle like quicksand in small rivulets underneath one’s feet, sweeping away the present into the wistful secrecies of longing and a vain search for a past whose blotted-out face is hiding its contours under the veil of confused recollections.
To go down the memory lane is to forget and to be born again in the haze, in the mist and confusion, to start redefining fragments of the old self scattered along the way. And perhaps the lingering scent of autumn still remains even as the heart strives for a new bloom, perhaps the fallen leaves reposing in a resigned silence on the tear-soaked earth of things past still swirl and whisper when the mild wind of memory comes to glide his fingers through their auburn hair. But they also create space – a space to grow new circles of wisdom, a space for the heart to expand and regain, in the serenity of nostalgia, a new vision of the old.
L'art de subtilité 