My covid reading list

Revision as of 13:02, 27 August 2021

The gloomy future which I was alluding to in my previous reading list is slowly but surely setting itself at ease in our daily lives. There is increasing massive and systematic surveillance, with France being particularly keen at leading the way towards a dystopian nightmare that we have been warned against so many times. One of the ironic tragedies of this great reset is that it will reset everything in its wake, including our literary heritage: Hugo, Lamartine, Bernanos (from the French side), Orwell, Huxley, Vonnegut (from the English one), they all become obsolete in the built back better world of which they warned us against.

I was afflicted to see one of the innumerable advocators of this new normal refer to Brassens to illustrate his dismay at how people would react like people to some random injunction of the time (wearing your mask in the train in between two intakes of peanuts, see this archive or the original). In the new normal, one can quote Brassens—possibly the most anarchist, rebellious, irreverent person who would have scorned what the society has come to—to support and ornate one's total immersion and perfect fitting into it. The culture is there, its understanding has gone. Will we be able to read such words as those:

Toi, l'étranger qui sans façon
D'un air malheureux m'as souri
Lorsque les gendarmes m'ont pris
Toi qui n'as pas applaudi quand
Les croquantes et les croquants
Tous les gens bien intentionnés
Riaient de me voir amené

at the same time as we celebrate the police taking away people who don't have the sanitary authorization in full order to have a coffee? Can we still read these words when we defend a uniform, compulsory and unavoidable new way of life for everybody:

Les braves gens n'aiment pas que L'on suive une autre route qu'eux.

The song actually quoted, les passantes, was not written by Brassens himself, though, but by the poet Antoine Pol, and is thus of rare purity, charm and virginity that is not usual in the blunt Brassens style. Our Brassens fan however, "une espèce de gredin n'ayant pas l'ombre d'un jardin", restored the irreverence by transmuting the metaphor of the poet into "les Cassantes" (?!). One should note that, however idiotic and a betrayal of the reference that it borrows from, the text is otherwise fairly well written (given the medium), with its author concluding that Pol and Brassens' understanding of the others in a public space is perpendicular to his own, which seems both true and honest. Interestingly, also Pol and Brassens failed to find each other, with Pol dying a week before their scheduled meeting where Brassens wanted to share his admiration and interpretation. There are countless such missed encountered, but in this new world, it seems that punctual, personal lost occasions will generalize to a civilization estranged from its past authors: what they had to say became suddenly obsolete, empty, at best decorative.

As an example of what they had to say, I could speak of «Un roi sand divertissement», which is definitively the masterpiece of my previous list. I have a different interpretation of the work than most of those I have read so far, of which I will write about when I have completed my survey of the work, including a probable second-reading as well as viewing the movie adapted from the novel, since it has been directed by the Author himself and thus could give further clues as to the intended meaning. Regardless, the ending where the protagonist eliminates himself by smoking a bar of dynamite, is one of the most powerful to any novel I know, for which the entire work seems to have been written as a prelude of a sudden and blunt revelation:

«Et il y eut, au fond du jardin, l’énorme éclaboussement d’or qui éclaira la nuit pendant une seconde. C’était la tête de Langlois qui prenait, enfin, les dimensions de l’univers.»

In those days where everybody seems to be agonizing to ensure one's immortality is maximized for all age groups, conditions and any other circumstances whatsoever, at any price this would cost, it is interesting to read from the previous world how one would, instead, contemplate one's own death as the escape to the unbearable weight of a meaningless or overdue life. This also reminds of the comte de Lasalle's famous declamation to Napoleon: «Tout hussard qui n’est pas mort à trente ans est un jean-foutre» (he would himself die at 34). Death used to be integrated to life, a punctuation, be it a full stop, an ellipsis, an exclamation or an interrogation mark. It is now, instead, a crime, an injustice, a loathing for which society as a whole as to be penitent, punished, vomited, chopped, blasted and immolated. It is no question anymore to take the dimension of the Universe, but to hate and condemn the others, who are responsible for infecting me, or my grandparents, or my uncle's friend's niece or the whole world.

Those are the open and bleeding injuries of a dying civilization. Raspail's vision got right the deliquescence, the moral corruption, the diarrhea of values and virtues that accompany this putrefaction. The mechanism itself, a mass invasion of countless Indian emigrants sailing through the Oceans on wrecks of metals and corpses to flood the cozy lifestyle of occidentals, is of little importance in the face of how sudden changes in people's opinions, convictions or even only culture and customs, can collapse at the speed of a succumbing old, venerable, but fragile and aging edifice.

My reading list as the world awaits its next swing into an emergency situation, while it still gathers potential for that in the meantime, keep following Giono. An essay, this time, Les Vraies Richesses, to try getting as close as possible to the essence of the character, whom I believe I start to delineate in attachment to virtues and values which are those I also hold stronger: what is natural, timeless, solid as opposed to what is fleeting, modern, revolutionary (not to say disruptive).

Kary Mullis is one of the highly relevant figures in the covid crisis, whose death a year before the events did not even prevent to impact given the breadth and impact of his views and declarations on medical science (see for intance [1]). He seems to be a sort of chemist version of Feynman. I've seen his TED talk: an instant classic. That he wrote such a book makes it an instant must-read at the top of the list.

Chinua Achebe's last item in the trilogy is to pay tribute to what we are doing here: taking the time to think about not the things themselves but how to approach them. It's a trilogy, the two previous rounds of my reading list featured the first two opuses, this one has to complete the tryptic. Basically, the same idea goes for Jared Diamond. I was, besides, commenting how these could be natural follow-up if things would perdure. I am, as was also observed, late, but still faster than the turns of events, so the thematics still holds. It'll certainly still be that way so there will be time to go farther along this route, without forgetting to take the sideways to keep an eye on the wisdom from the past, however irrelevant it may quickly become.

⇠ See also the previous reading list.