So, topic of the day: “Are we free to write our life? » André, you have 5 minutes.
All right, so I'll start with “Are we free?” “.
Well no, we are not free from much in our lives. We are – initially, in any case – better defined by the sum of our attachments and our servitudes, than by those of our freedoms. It's not that bad. I hardly believe in freedom as a reality, more as an ideal.
And I believe above all in liberation, more than in freedom. All life is a work of liberation. I can tell you about it, I was a psychiatrist for 40 years! I assure you that there are a lot of things that we must free ourselves from! Our fears, our useless annoyances, our complexes, our prejudices, our certainties…
These liberation efforts are never finished, but if they are sometimes tiring, they are always exciting. Morality: freedom is never achieved, but by working for it, we get closer…
So much for “are we free?” “. Now, “write your life”!
I really like the idea of writing one's life, of striving to be the author, or the author, of one's existence, it seems very fair to me, this idea. Writing, like living, means choosing what you are going to tell, it is seeking to make coherent, after the fact, what was not necessarily coherent at the time. It’s sometimes a shame, sometimes a shock….
“It's a curious solitary activity to live… You have, every day, the impression of going on the wrong path. And then the temptation is great to go back and take another path. We must not succumb to this temptation but follow the same route. It's a bit like being behind the wheel of a car at night, in winter, and driving on ice, with no visibility. You have no choice, you can't go back, you have to keep moving forward, telling yourself that the road will eventually be more stable and the fog will clear. »
It's beautiful, isn't it? That's because it's not from me, but from Patrick Modiano! It's in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. And in fact, the first sentence was not: “A curious solitary activity is that of living.” » but: “A curious solitary activity is that of writing. » Admit that it still worked well, right?
In these words, everything is said about the difficulties of writing one's life: we vaguely know where we want to go but we do not necessarily know where we will arrive; we are looking for our way, we don't always see very clearly or very far away. However, we know that it is better to continue moving forward than to doubt and constantly turn back.
Another thing that this image of wanting to write about your life inspires in me: there are going to be a lot of co-authors who are going to get involved! I'm going to write a first script, put my life plans on paper. But chance, adversity, encounters… will regularly shake up this scenario, which I will have to constantly adapt.
Life harbors a great deal of uncertainty and inconsistency, failure and misdirection. Wanting to write your life, wanting to lead it, is wanting to limit your share of it. And later, when we tell this life path to our grandchildren, or when we write it, we will add coherence, we will bring out details, signs, explanations… The Englishman Julian Barnes, in his beautiful novel The Parrot by Flaubert, writes these very apt words:
“The Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things are not. I'm not surprised that some people prefer books. »
We can also prefer both: books and life, the reassuring coherence of our life stories, and the unpredictable or caressing frictions of reality, which are the spice of human existence…
