This column is to tell you how happy and touched I was to talk to you for two years. How much your reactions have carried me, sometimes shaken me, made me think and always interested me, moved me, upset me. I confided in you, in my life, my state of mind, my thoughts on current events, I trusted you, and you trusted me. I told you about my fears, my wishes, my vacations, my children, my vision of the world, and you received these confidences with grace.
In your letters, you reveal to me what worries you, what revolts you or what carries you, and we sometimes exchange like old friends, as a family, even though we don’t know each other. We have built bonds, we have discussed many subjects that affect us, we have connected to the essential through this fruitful dialogue, and together we have succeeded in overcoming this world of virtuality that dehumanizes us and takes away our mind and soul. That reduces us to algorithms and consumer objects, that draws us into an incessant flow of notifications just for the purpose of collecting our data, that bogs us down in a technicality that we can no longer master and that leads us astray in a digital forest, us the dreamy Little Thumbs.
We rebelled, we wrote, we decided to say what we are, to reveal our tastes and our ideas, but voluntarily, not through a sordid collection on a space that represents more of a market value than a real community, in which we are drowning, day by day – and this is only the beginning, given the shock that the advent of artificial intelligence represents.
You are not artificial, you are flesh and blood, you exist, you live almost everywhere. You have written to me, and even many letters that I have kept close to me like talismans, and that I sometimes reread, since letters have this charm of being able to be unfolded and reread, rediscovered endlessly, from year to year: you tell me your story, you talk to me about memories of youth, your profession and your relationship with writing, and you ask me how I am. With a human, real writing, dipped in the ink of your lives, you have become parents to me, parents of humanity. You have sent me photos, cards and even gifts, which I have arranged around my desk.
For two years, without realizing it, you carried me, transported me by your thoughts, deep, sincere, enthusiastic. It is not always easy to write because we are alone, most of the time: no one congratulates you every time you write a sentence. Every Tuesday, you held my pen appreciating what I wrote, you gave me wings to improve myself and go all the way with my projects.
I continued the exchange with some of you, and that is why today I would like to say thank you. Thank you my sisters, who are my sisters. I do not know you but in a few words I love you. Thank you also to all those who did not agree, and who expressed it. Thank you to those who did and who said it, better than me, in messages that made me smile, that made me happy, that made me cry with joy. Thank you for reading me, understanding me, commenting. I confided in you, I put myself in your hands because readers of The crossyou unknowingly form a community of good people.
Patrick, Claude, Siong, Nathalie, Jean, Isabelle, Yves, Cécile, Bernard, Hélène, Jean-Louis, my sister Clothilde, Georges, Xavier, Jean-René, Marie-Antoinette, Marie, Arthur, Michel, Hubert… you have written me such beautiful things that I keep them, preciously, on my heart. You, readers of The crossyou are not like other readers. Without knowing it, you have created a real community, not those communities of virtual friends that only have the name, not a community in the religious sense of the term, although religion is present in your hearts, but a community of spirit, of those who dare to think, love, meditate and believe.
Thank you Christophe, thank you Fabienne, for giving me this chance to know you, to know them, and to console myself in these difficult years of violence and hatred, and thank you for having known how to preserve this island of frankness, of dialogue, of intact reflections, this space that allows us to breathe: reading, writing, culture save us from this often desperate and increasingly distressing world, from these sectarian excesses where religion loses its meaning, but alas not its name. These values that carry you constitute the foundation of transmission, which is the beating heart of our lives. Let’s continue the exchange!
