Living kills. A good friend told me this on one occasion, long before the epidemic, one day when we were discussing this obsession that they try to instill in us so that we don’t eat anything remotely carcinogenic, we exercise, we avoid stress. As if in the end we could avoid returning to dust, when the only reason for dying, deep down, is having lived. But that is something we often lose sight of, and French writer Pascal Bruckner is there to remind us. His latest essay, ‘Living in slippers. On renunciation of the world today‘, a reflection arising from the pandemic, when the author confirmed that, more than ever before, many people are finding refuge in their bathrobe and slippers, reluctant to the outside world, to reality. To live.
His work begins by remembering a Russian literary character, the Russian landowner Oblomova textbook lazy man who decided to live without doing anything at all: “Locomotion, standing are for him nothing more than interruptions between two stays in bed or on the sofa.” A few chapters later, we find Madame Bovarywhom we all run the risk of resembling when we have our cell phone in our hands. «It should be a simple machine, but we are at your service», says the writer. The result is a clash between the reality that surrounds us and the one that assaults us through the device, which with its filters always seems prettier. Like the reality that Flaubert’s heroine imagined, which inevitably made reality unbearable for her. For what you have to see outside, it’s better to stay home, or stick your head in the screen.
Faced with this, Bruckner preaches the need to live life, but truly life: “You have to open the window, breathe fresh air, go outside, meet people, take risks, know the risks that others take, interact”. “The other option, closing in on oneself, is very boring and the boredom, which is a monotony of repeating and repeating, is tremendous,” he warns.
The author also points out a very curious paradox. In European societies, with much fewer problems and concerns than there are in other areas of the world, it seems that we live going from drama to drama. “Look: in today’s society we constantly receive messages about how important it is to be calm, to rest, to do yoga, to find inner peace, but our lives, the lives of European citizens, are very calm.” Seen this way, “the solution to our banality is not calm, but activity.”
A man of extensive intellectual background, with his essay full of literary references, it is inevitable to ask him if literature, when we put ourselves in front of the mirror of a Bovary or an Oblomovcan save us: “Yes, it can save us, it can help us, but there is no opposition between reading and going outside, both compatible things.” Pascal Bruckner goes even further, stating that, in fact, “literature cannot mean closing in, but it has to mean opening up.”
With so much talk about people who don’t move from the spot, it makes it a bit hesitant to ask them about a bad trip. His response is very fast, he is very clear. It was a trip to Greece that he took in the company of his youngest son. Everything went wrong, or almost: “The hotel was ugly, and we also had to sleep several nights on the roof because it was full.” “All calamities,” he recalls, putting his hands to his head. «We returned to France on a night train sleeping on the floorso we arrived in Paris more tired than we left. The best thing about the little trip in question is that “human beings tend to quickly forget the bad.”
Perhaps, given the success, would it have been better to stay at home, living in slippers? “At all. “Always, always, the trip is better, so next time you know what precautions you have to take.” Life…
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