Finding Beauty Again (Merci Proust)

As I was reading Proust, the part when he is on a train on his way to a thermal station where he discovers during a halt a beautiful young farm girl. Just the sight of this beautiful woman gave him back the taste of Beauty, some kind of meaning in his life, I was about to experience first hand that experience a few hours after having read his words.

I was taking a break from playing a video-game, smoking on my balcony and watching peoples passing by. I love watching people. It’s sound creepy, maybe it is, but after staying for years, more than a decade in fact, in a little village with almost nobody walking by, (or if you saw someone, you’ll definitely know that person), after that dryness human experience of seeing little to nobody new, living in a city full of people that you don’t know and don’t know you is an exhilarating experience. It’s almost like you’re living again, reborn, back in society.

So, there I was, smoking my cigarette, observing life and society going about their life when I spot a beautiful woman. Not the first one that I’ve spotted, high up in my balcony, but after reading Proust, that sight was powerful and full of meaning.

There I was, experiencing what a man who died one century ago wrote about.

This is the magic of literature. Well, one of the many perks of reading a book.

That lady was walking her littler black dog, making me think of a Bob Dylan song, «A Hard Rain A-Gonna Fall» when he sings: I met white men who walked a black dog.

No, the simple sight of an attractive woman leads me to music. Life is strange, but art found a way to make it magic. Does art have a defined function? I don’t know, and I wish not, because it would put art in a shackle. We, human, have to categorize everything, it’s in our nature, everything has to be in a box.

Art isn’t in a box, well, it is in every box and a box itself.

And art was what I was seeing. I was looking at Beauty.

And that thought came out of my brain: go, talk to this lady, tell her something!

Hell no! Hell no! The time have changed, and for good, I think. We are living in a time where yelling at a lady passing by is not ok.

What if I was in the lady’s situation and someone I don’t know yell for me to give him or her my phone number? I would keep my head down and go away. We never know with people nowadays.

I kept watching her, I wasn’t hiding myself, it was already weird enough for me to look at her, if she ever rises her head toward me, I didn’t wanted to scare her.

And then, I started imagining her life. She was probably in her early twenty’s, probably a student, walking her family dog, taking a walk in the sun. Did she have a boyfriend? A girlfriend? How happy was she in her life? What was the cross she had to carry?

And then, she left, took a nearby street, disappearing from my eyes.

I rediscovered Beauty, at least for a little while.

Thanks to Marcel Proust, whenever I see Beauty, I feel grateful and alive. I’ve found an answer to a question I wasn’t asking myself before reading him.

Extract (in French) from Proust book; A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs :

«Était-ce parce que je ne l’avais qu’entr’apercue que je l’avais si belle ? Peut-être. D’abord, l’impossibilité de s’arrêter auprès d’une femme, le risque de ne pas la retrouver un autre jour lui donnent brusquement le même charme qu’à un pays la maladie ou la pauvreté qui nous empêchent de le visiter, ou qu’aux jours si ternes qui nous restaient à vivre, le combat où nous succomberons sans doute. De sorte que, s’il n’y avait pas l’habitude, la vie devrait paraître délicieuse à des êtres qui seraient à chaque heure menacés de mourir, – c’est-à-dire à tous les hommes. Puis, si l’imagination est entraînée par le désir de ce que nous pouvons posséder, son essor n’est pas limité par une réalité complètement perçue dans ces rencontres où les charmes de la passante sont en relation directe avec la rapidité du passage. Pour peu que la nuit tombe et que la voiture aille vite, à la campagne, dans une ville, il n’y a pas un torse féminin, mutilé comme un marbre antique par la vitesse qui nous entraîne et le crépuscule qui le noie, qui ne tire sur notre cœur, à chaque coin de route, du fond de chaque boutique, les flèches de la Beauté, de la Beauté dont on serait parfois tenté de se demander si elle est en ce monde autre chose que la partie de complément qu’ajoute à une passante fragmentaire et fugitive notre imagination surexcitée par le regret.»

Jaskiers

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Once Upon A Time, There Was America

Have you ever heard that old saying, it was ‘better back in the good old days’?

How hypocrite and stupid is this saying! If you are reading this, if you are a white and straight male, trust me, today’s world is the same as it was before. Maybe a little (slightly?) ‘better’, for those who haven’t been born privileged.

There was a time, my friends, where being black was more difficult than today. And even as of today, it is still awfully difficult for them.

Being homosexual? Back in the ‘good ol’ days’? Let me give you a friendly reminder, it was illegal to be gay in America until 2003.

Being black, or gay, or both, life was about being outcasted. Wait, hold on, more than outcasted, they were lynched, insulted, threatened, and even killed. And you couldn’t ask the law to help. You had to pick up yourself and go on. If they didn’t kill you of course. It’s still going on today…

See, I’m an old, old man now. My job, all along my life, was reporter. Working with prestigious newspapers, doing real investigations. Of course there wasn’t any internet, everything was… slower. But we, reporters, on the ground, behind our typewriter, we were spreading informations, real ones. If you were fake my friend, no newspaper wanted you on board. The news rooms were battlefields.

Hunter S. Thompson, who breaked the codes and the boundaries, Woodward and Bernstein and their detective works pushing Nixon out of the fucking White House, you named it.

Those were the day when journalist, writer, poets were Rockstars along with Jim Morrison, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, The Rolling Stones. It was a revolution.

God, it was as violent as today. Maybe a little less, considering the amount of mass shootings skyrocketing right now.

But ‘back in those good ol’ days’, protest could turns into slaughter. For example, the four of may 1970, when the National Guard killed four students in Ohio while protesting against the war in Vietnam.

This was also the discovery of a new type of horror, serial killers. I won’t mention their names, you probably know some. But let me tell you, today, we do not have serial killers, well there is, but now, schools shootings seems to have taken the place of those monsters.

It’s terrifying. A bunch of people, mostly women, loved serial killers. Now, people admire school shooters. Those are mostly young men, white and with a simple access to gun. They kill as much as serial killer on a shorter period of time. And it’s spreading all over the country. Never ending.

Politics ask for thoughts and prayers, but no laws about restraining or even banning guns. And even if such laws pass, it barely does anything. Because, the NRA got some high profile politicians on theirs paycheck. In my opinion, this is legal bribing… Therefore, it will not end soon. Kids in America go to school like their in a war zone. All this for Freedom… kids pay that American Freedom by dying in classrooms…

Man, America is violence. It begun by the massacre of Native American. We live in a bloodstain soil, in violence in it’s purest form. Something got to change. We thought that a black president would change things drastically. It didn’t. A beautiful symbol of course, a powerful step forward but… nothing have changed.

We all needs a new Martin Luther King, a Robert Kennedy, a Malcom X before is assassination, someone need to help the black community and make the whites understand the tragic situation that the blacks and other minorities are facing. We need someone to gather us, to show us that we can live together and that we being divided and manipulated constantly for political gains… Why? Because a polarized and divided country is easier to govern. Divide and conquer. We should talk about sexism, the meetoo movement, women denouncing the sexual abuse and assault they face in their life. Powerful men who thought they were untouchable had to face justice. Femicids are on a all tome high. The fight need to go on. Equality is far from being reached.

Back in the ‘good ol’ days’c I was in the newsroom when Doctor King died. Same as for the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

I was at the scene of the murder of his younger brother, Bobby.

This was America sacrificing a potential peaceful and brighter future.

Today is better than the past. Come on, let’s not being grumpy, you, old folks dreaming of the past reading this. But it is far, far from being perfect. Because, like I’ve already said before, from the get go, things were already extremely bad. We need to care for each others, to stop being scared of our neighbors. Tolerance, respect, communicate, sharing! We need to be together so bad. Let’s not live in fear, this is not a life to live frightened. Neo-nazism is back in force, we need to face them, block them, and fight to keep our democracy.

I will live this earth soon, for a better place, I hope to at least. But I doubt this world is going in the right direction.

It was just the rambling of an old man. Sometimes, it’s good to hear what they have to say.

So, stand for what’s right, for your rights, for you life.

Jaskiers