My covid reading list
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 between peanuts) [1]. In the new normal, one can quote Brassens—possibly the most anarchist, rebellious, irreverent person who would have scorned arbitrary and segregating sanitary measures to impose new rules to control the flow of sheep in the stock—to support one's fitting into this new society. The culture is there, its understanding has gone. Will we be able to read such words at the same time as we celebrate the police to take away people who don't have the sanitary authorization in full-order to take a coffee:
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
«Un roi sand divertissement» 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 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.
