Hugo, "Crépuscule"

A work ("Twilight") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

A white moiré shroud shakes amidst the woods,
A cryptic pond gleams where the clearing waits;
The trees stretch deep, their branches black like soot;
Did you see Venus there in lightest gait?

Or Venus dancing on the hilly peak?
Are you then lovers, passing through the shades?
As brown paths are with muslin white arrayed,
To sleeping tombs the waking grass will speak.

What says the grass? How then the tomb's reply?
If you live, love!  Beneath the yews we're cold. 
Hare, find your hole!  Love, love!  Soft falls the night;
Be happy while our thoughts retain their mold.

Live! God wants us loved. Make us envy you,
O pairs who pass beneath green hazels' womb. 
All that, when leaving life, lives in the tomb,
We took from love, in prayer so to use.

Our dead ere were so beautiful indeed;
The shaded glowworm strays with torch aloft;
This tomb will shake, by God's will so decreed,  
Amidst the swaths on wind upon a toft.

The reaper's dull tread shall make meadows quake;
A black roof's shape shall trace a cottage bare;
The heavens' star, with flowers' vivid glare,
Shall open splendid freshness in its wake.

Love! 'Tis the month of ripest berry fruit.
And dreamy evening's angel shall embed,
Afloat on wind and darkest wing's pursuit,
The quick's each kiss with prayers of the dead.

Montaigne, "Des menteurs"

An essay ("On liars") by this French writer.  You can read the original here.

There is no man whom speaking from memory pleases less than me; therein I recognize but traces of myself. And yet I think there cannot be in all the world a memory as marvelously treacherous as mine own. All my other faculties may be vile and common, but in memory I believe myself to be singular, so rare and worthy of gaining both name and reputation.

In addition to this natural disadvantage I suffer (for certainly, given its necessity, Plato was right to deem memory a great and powerful goddess), there is another: when one says in my country that a man has no sense, one says he has no memory. And when I lament the failure of my own memory, I am not believed and instead rebuked as if I were accusing myself of senselessness. These parties see no choice between memory and understanding, which would truly worsen my state of affairs. But they do me an injustice because experience has demonstrated precisely the opposite: namely, excellent memories conjoined with foolish judgments. Here also they do me an injustice – I who know nothing as well as being a friend – whereby the same words that accuse me of infirmity represent ingratitude. They discount and mistrust my affection owing to my memory and contort my natural shortcoming into a shortcoming of conscience. "He has forgotten," they say, "this prayer or that vow"; "he no longer remembers his friends"; "he never remembers to say, or to do, or not to mention this or that for my sake." Certainly it is easy for me to forget. But to neglect a task given to me by a friend, this I do not do. May my own misery be enough without my being accused of malice, as malice is just as much the enemy of my own humor.          

To some extent I am able to console myself. Firstly because my poor memory is an evil whose primary purpose is to correct a greater evil that would have easily arisen within me: namely, ambition, an unbearable shortcoming for those wishing to conduct public affairs. As in many similar examples in its development, nature has fortified all other faculties in me to the same extent that it has diminished memory. Otherwise, if the inventions and opinions of others had been summoned by my memory, I might have easily reposed my mind and judgment, without letting them exert their full powers, upon these alien reports. My speech may even be more concise, as the storehouse of memory is surely more stocked with material than that of invention. And if invention had kept me supplied, I would have deafened all my friends with my babble – deafened with subjects which excited my own faculty of their manipulation and employment, as well as animated and guided my discourse – and yet examples from some of my close friends will show what a pity this all is. As their memories furnish them with present and whole landscapes, they start their narratives so far back and embed them with so many extenuating circumstances that, if a story is good, it will be stuffed with goodness, and if it isn't, you will condemn the vitality of their memory or lament their decidedly poor judgment. And it is no small feat to cease a story when it is well along its way, for in no one action does one recognize the power of a horse as in a round and sudden stop.

Even among those who remain pertinent, I see that they wish to but cannot undo their course. And while they search for a fine point at which to halt, they end up traipsing about wobbly-legged in force and speech. Old men are the most dangerous, for in them remains the remembrance of things past even if they lack any memory of how often they have retold these events. I have seen some very pleasant stories become dull and irritating on the lips of a gentleman because each member of his audience had been gorged on the tale a hundred times over. Secondly, I remember fewer offenses endured over the years, as the old man might say. Nevertheless, I would need a protocol of offenses like that of Darius who, so as not to forget the offenses he suffered from the Athenians, made a page sing thrice in his ear each time he sat down to eat, "Sire, remember the Athenians." And yet, the places and books that I see again still smile at me with a new freshness.    

It is not without reason that we say that he who does not consider his memory to be strong enough should not try his luck as a liar. I know full well that grammarians differentiate between telling an untruth and lying. Telling an untruth, they aver, is to say something false which we have taken to be true; whereas the definition of the word "to lie" in Latin (mentire, from which our French mentir stems) seems more akin to going against our own conscience. Consequently, I only wish to speak about those who say things contrary to what they know to be true. These here either wholly invent the untruths, or they disguise and alter a veracious source. In the case of the latter, they often find that once they have made their replacements, it becomes uncomfortable to undo them because the thing the way it really is remains lodged in their memory, impressed by means of knowledge and science. And here it becomes difficult for the truth not to manifest itself to their imagination, at once dislodging the falsehood, which could never have so firm or serene a foothold, as well as evoking the circumstances of its initial acquisition. And all this flows into and obliges the mind to lose the the false and bastardized pieces it has concocted.

As for the stories they wholly invent, in as much as there is no impression to the contrary that will rattle their falseness, they seem to have far fewer fears of mistelling a story. And yet even these creations, since they are vain bodies without hold, will soon elude the memory if not well secured. Of these matters I have had pleasant experiences at the expense of those who profess to speak in no way other than what serves them best in their business, and what pleases the high-and-mighty people to whom they are uttered. Since these circumstances in which they seek to enslave their faith and their conscience may be subjected to many a change, their words will always need to vary. And so they may come to the same object and say to one man one thing and to another man another, to wit, that sometimes this object is gray and other times yellow. And if by chance these men report to one another their so opposite instructions, what shall become of this fine art? Moreover it must often happen that they imprudently defeat themselves; for what memory could endure so many memories in so many diverse forms, all forged from the same subject? I have seen many in my time desiring the reputation of this lovely type of wisdom. What they do not see, however, is that if their reputation is already abroad, there can no longer be any effect.     

So in truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor are we linked to one another if not by words. If we knew the horror and gravity of such lies, we would pursue them with flames more justly than other crimes. It seems to me that we find common amusement in chastising children for innocent mistakes, very poorly chosen, and that we torment them for capricious acts which have neither impression nor import. Whereas, in my opinion, only lying, and a notch below, obstinacy, should be combated in children at every instance from birth to development for they grow with them. And once we have granted their tongue false reins, it is amazing to see how impossible they are to retract. Hence we may see otherwise honest men who to this vice are subjects and slaves. I know a good tailor's lad whom I have never once heard speak the truth, simply because it has never been to his advantage.

If like truth, mistruth had but one face, we would be on better terms, for we would take for granted the opposite of what the liar would say. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand countenances and an indefinite playing field. The Pythagoreans make the good certain and finite, and evil infinite and uncertain. A thousand routes to miss the bull's-eye and only one to hit it. I am not sure that I would be able to safeguard my well-being from evident and extreme danger through effrontery and solemn untruth.

An ancient father says that we are better off the in the company of a dog we know than in the company of a man whose language we do not understand. As Pliny states, Ut externus alieno non sit hominis vice – a stranger cannot be said to take the place of a man. So how much less sociable than silence is false language?

King Francis I boasted of having trapped in this way Francesco Taverna, ambassador of Francesco Sforza Duke of Milan, a man very famous in the art of parlour verbiage. He had been dispatched to offer his master's pardons to His Majesty regarding a matter of great consequence. So as to maintain some intelligence sources in Italy from where He was most recently driven, and especially with the Duke of Milan, the King had advised a Gentleman to stay close to the Duke on His behalf. This Gentleman became in effect an ambassador, but in appearance was merely a private citizen who pretended to be there to see to his own personal affairs, whereas the Duke, who depended much more on the Emperor (mostly because at the time he was in a contract of marriage with his niece, daughter of the King of Denmark and present dowager of Lorraine) could not disclose any practice or conference with us without his own great interest. For this commission a Milanese Gentleman by the name of Merveille, and equerry to the King, was found. He was dispatched with some private credentials and ambassadorial instructions, and with other letters of recommendation to the Duke regarding his own private affairs for the mask and show of business. 

In fact, he remained so long with the Duke that the Emperor began to experience a certain amount of suspicion, which led to what occurred subsequently as we might surmise. It happened that, under the guise of murder, the Duke had his trial completed in two days and his head cut off in the middle of the night. Signor Francesco came, however, with a long and counterfeit conclusion about this story, since the King had already addressed His queries to all the Princes of Christianity and to the Duke himself, had His audience with His morning counsel, and was lobbying for His own cause and had raised to this end many plausible justifications. Firstly, his master had never taken our man Merveille for anything less than a private gentleman and this subject, who had come to Milan to conduct business, had never lived under a different guise. Secondly, he disavowed even having known that he had been part of the King's household, nor having known of him to begin with, so that He took him for an ambassador. The King for his part pressed on with various objections and demands and burdened him from every side; finally He got him on the matter of the execution's having been carried out at night, and whether it had been committed in stealth. To which the poor, embarrassed man responded so as to be honest as well as out of respect for His Majesty that the Duke would have been very troubled if the execution had taken place during the day. Anyone could think how he was perceived having been so brutally cut down alongside the nostril of someone like King Francis.

Pope Julius II, having sent an ambassador to the King of England to rouse him against King Francis, the ambassador having heard his duties, and the King of England having delayed his response owing to the difficulties he encountered in preparing what he required to combat such a powerful King, alleged various reasons for this last problem. And the ambassador did not respond well to the matter, saying that he had also considered for his part the same difficulties, and had mentioned all of them to the Pope. From these words so distant from his proposal, which would have been to drive him headlong into war, the King of England found the first argument for that which he would discover later, namely that this ambassador in his private intentions depended on the French side and had revealed his master. His possessions were confiscated and he narrowly escaped losing his life as well.

Baudelaire, "Le parfum"

A poem ("Perfume") by this French master.  You can read the original here.

O reader have you ever breathed,                 
With drunkenness and greed's caress,         
The incense from a church recess,              
Or chronic musk in sachets sheathed?

O deepest magic charm's sweet thrall,                
In present or in past restored!     
As lovers place on their adored
Mnemonic petals of their fall.

From such elastic, heavy hair,          
Alive by alcove censer bright,           
A wild and savage scent emerged;

In vestments, muslin, velvet wear,  
Embalmed of purest youth's delight,   
A fur's perfume was once submerged.

Rendez-vous

Away from light steals home my heavy son,
And private in his chamber pens himself,
Shuts up his windows, locks fair daylight out,
And makes himself an artificial night.

                                                                                                    Romeo and Juliet, I.i

There are star-crossed lovers, lovers cut into little stars, stars that exhale meteors, but the tales of love woven across the centuries of literature remain in our memory because we fear one thing: that the love of which we read will never infect the air of which we breathe. Those who claim that love is but chemical dependency provoked to perpetuate a species have never loved one afternoon or evening on this earth; and though we cannot begrudge them their bitterness their words need not concern us. The love that is high as the sun in day and cautious and hidden as the moon when darkness reigns, this is what each of us desires, however estranged we may feel from the world at large. And however we may speak of teenage infatuation, as exemplified by the most famous couple in literary history, love is a barometer of maturity: it is the ability to know when to cast down one's arms and call off the search. We cannot expect a fourteen-year-old maiden to know anything of love, and the expectation may be equally unreasonable for a rather frisky eighteen-year-old from Toulouse. Which brings us to this film.

The premise may be old hat, but something about it occludes sleaze or cynicism. A young woman, Anne Larrieu, dite Nina (Juliette Binoche), departs her rustic hometown for the bright lights of Paris with the tentative goal of becoming an actress, which is another way of saying she wants to do something where she wouldn't have to be herself. We first see her walking into Gertrude Soissons Real Estate and onto the radar of a rather hapless lad named Paulot (Wadeck Stanczak). Paulot, whose name conjures up a nursery rhyme, quickly develops feelings for her although the signals she sends suggest nymphomania, insouciance, and a certain amount of self-loathing (the most famous being, "the nights I have spent alone in Paris I can count on one hand"). Nina does have one modest role in a bawdy farce, "Tea or cocoa," which is one of the few lines uttered by her character, a ditzy, underdressed French maid, and Paulot is mysteriously presented with an extra ticket. Now anyone with even scant knowledge of female machinations would know that a pretty young girl with an unstable job and no real friends in a city like Paris does not just happen to have an extra ticket. Paulot becomes in short order her bodyguard and confidant but unlike most of the other male characters not her lover. That duty is predominantly left to his enigmatic and self-destructive flatmate, Quentin (the immortally handsome Lambert Wilson).

Quentin's appearance about fifteen minutes in points the film in a more somber direction – precisely the "artificial night" of Shakespeare's play and for good reason. In slow details that reward the viewer's patience, Quentin is revealed to have once been a fine actor in a production of Romeo and Juliet four years prior. His Juliet, a woman we never get to see, was also his lover after rehearsals and the passenger in the car wreck that only he survived.  He is brooding, histrionic, and completely self-absorbed – in other words, a typical actor. When Nina whacks him with a shoe, the camera remains on his face as he bleeds and cackles. We never get to see her expression because it doesn't matter to him and, therefore, not to us. The first time he and Nina make love is preceded by a ridiculous display with a razor, a weapon that will be wielded on different occasions throughout the film, and not only by Quentin. His stalking of Nina ("I get the feeling you've been following me since we met") worsens the tensions between him and poor old Paulot, who end up convening unwillingly at her apartment one fateful morning. After parboiling himself in frenzied platitudes and maniacal grins, Quentin departs to a dog's-eye perspective beneath some bumpers. We never glimpse his body but are simply informed in good theatrical fashion that a death has occurred off-stage, at which point the third act begins with a sad middle-aged gentleman called Scrutzler (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Quentin was once Romeo and the daughter of Scrutzler, whose name evinces an ignorance of German nomenclature, was his Juliet. Scrutzler himself was the director who hand-picked Quentin ("The first minute I saw him, I knew"), and his performance was so impressive that even when Nina re-encounters Fred, her dressing room lover at "Tea or cocoa," Fred remembers just how good Quentin was. So when Nina meets Scrutzler – in the words of Quentin, "a madman who calls me every day trying to save me" – there is only one destiny left to be revealed.   

Romeo and Juliet's quandary, if one may employ such a term, is that they are too young to know better and expiate their sins on the basis of their artlessness. They immerse themselves in second-hand passions because the idea of love is more valuable to die for than the courageous act of life. To her credit, one thing that Nina doesn't wish for is death, perhaps because life has yet to fulfill its promise. On more than one occasion she is accused of being immune to love, owing in no small part to her nightly gambols, and she wonders whether this is true, whether she is doomed to be the halfwitted maid who "always finds something to like about a man." There is enough nudity to satisfy those who feel such a life cannot be accurately depicted by suggestive parlor talk alone, but the flesh that does appear is never gratuitous and always advances the story line (when Paulot finally makes his clumsy, telegraphed move, for example, Nina just begs him to get done with it since he's just like all the rest; naturally, he leaves flustered and appalled). The story line, however, does not quite drift where we think it might go, and again we see that much more effort was exerted in sculpting the film than in naming it. And at some point towards the end it also occurs to the viewer that the actress who has become Juliet has the same name in our reality. Quite a burden for a young actress unless she lives past fourteen.  

Ignorance

The greater the period of time left behind us, the more irresistible the voice inviting us to return. This phrase has the look and feel of evidence, but all the same it is untrue. As one gets older and the end nears, each moment becomes more and more precious, and one no longer has time to waste on memories. One has to understand the mathematical paradox of nostalgia: it is more powerful in the throes of youth when the volume of life lived is completely insignificant.

                                                                                                                  Milan Kundera, L'ignorance

Watching this pretentious quilt of a film a while back, I was reminded of an old (and incorrect) saying: judge not the act for the place in which it occurs. Paris, a place I have never been able to get over, makes the most trivial of acts and banal of conversations seem more profound and life-changing. It colors the shades of my twilights, the reflections upon a citied river, the dappled incongruity of the houses and brasseries that have no comparison in any other city, the weather that always seems to enhance our rising emotions. Yes, readers of these pages know my weaknesses, and one of them is surely for the metropolises of Northern Europe. Strange that, as my ancestors hail from all corners of the Mediterranean; perhaps it is my conscious effort to overcome my bloodlines; perhaps, and more likely, it is among these northern lights – Paris, London, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Moscow, Amsterdam, Prague, Vienna, Stockholm, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Helsinki – that my soul has found the balance of culture, language, art and humanism that will forever nourish its dreams. And should memory serve me well – and it is usually a docile hound – I first flipped through this book on the ground floor of this bookstore several years ago. 

Only the German translation was available, and a few pages of random reading (my usual method of selection) suggested that waiting to acquire the original would probably be a better idea. Memory has yet to yield any data regarding that brief dalliance apart from the plot blurb on the back, which I seem to remember verbatim, and a few scattered thoughts about one woman's rather melodramatic and tragic return home (home, in this case, being this breathtaking city). The result is an odd novel, more a pastiche of the author's memories than anything else, and proof positive that where something takes place undoubtedly influences how we view what takes place. Our protagonist – well, our initial protagonist – is a Czech émigré called Irena, now living in Paris with her adult daughter. Like many of her compatriots Irena fled her homeland when the Red Army decided to practice tank manoeuvres in downtown Prague. Twenty-one years later, when the wall of ignorance between East and West was finally torn down, she was faced with a choice: return to a country she no longer knows or remain in another country where she will never truly be at home. It is a choice that every émigré and political refugee faces once another tyrant has been destroyed (we have, thank Heavens, only a few left), and there are no advantages to making a decision that has already been made by history. As our omniscient narrator comments: "But what can a man who has come to see the country of his past think of, if not of his past?" And here is where Irena wades through the waters of oblivion and finds some shells and artefacts she did not expect.

She goes back in time to her ex-husband Martin, now held against the light of the most typical filters of the past: her current lover, a Swede by the name of Gustaf, and "the one who got away," a Czech émigré and veterinarian called Josef. Martin dies after several years in France and with him dies her last opportunity to speak her native language on a daily basis, her daughter predictably preferring the new to the old. Gustaf is the very opposite of Martin: loud, almost rambunctious, unbeset by sadness and nostalgia (like many Scandinavians, he felt "limited" by the smallness of his country), and callow in the ways of the Iron Curtain. When the Berlin Wall does tumble, it is Gustaf who immediately suggests that Irena go back and take a look around – with him, of course, as a willing accomplice. Since he has never lost his country or the occasion to return to it, he could not possibly understand what leaving the ones you love for good might signify. His blithe, almost troglodyte manner is belied by the heaviness in Irena's eyes. Irena, we are told early on, is very much like the most famous wanderer in literary history. Indeed, given the twenty-year hiatus and the irretrievability of so much of the past (Odysseus and Irena both leave around the age of thirty-five), Ignorance provides a true account of Ulysses, because unlike Joyce's masterpiece, we witness a departure, period of absence, and return. The return is more important than the wanderings because the wanderings mean nothing if they cannot end; this is not to find fault with the metaphor Joyce borrowed but rather to underscore Kundera's closer approximation. And like Odysseus, who returns to his beloved Penelope after two decades away, Irena feels little of what she thought she might feel upon her touching Czech soil anew. So much so that Kundera offers an analysis: "If I were a doctor, I would issue the following prognosis in his case: 'The patient suffers from an insufficiency of nostalgia.'" This prognosis is quickly amended to: "'The patient suffers from a masochistic deformation of his memory.'" What is amusing about such a remark is that it no longer refers to Irena, but to the man she re-encounters twenty years later, Josef.

About a third of the way through the novel, Josef hijacks the narrator's attention and we are thrown headlong into his world. Josef also left his family behind, although he was unmarried and began a family in his new homeland, Denmark. Unlike Irena, however, Josef selected another small country as his destination; he would not melt into the ethnic stew that France was becoming in the 1960s, but stick out rather prominently in still-homogenous Copenhagen. Here we find a wonderful passage on the much-maligned "small country complex":

To be ready to give your life for your country: all nations of the world have known the temptation of such a sacrifice. The enemies of the Czechs, as it were, have also known it: the Germans, the Russians. But these are great nations. Their patriotism is different: they are exalted by their glory, their importance, their universal mission. The Czechs loved their country not because it was rife with glory but because it was unknown; not because it was great and elevated, but because it was small and constantly imperiled. Thus their patriotism signifies immense compassion for their country. The Danes are the same. It was not by chance that Josef chose to emigrate to a small country.

The details of Josef's youth after he discovers his old high school diary and is astonished that he didn't bother to take it along with him might remind the Kundera connoisseur of the author himself. After all, we are regaled on the usual tales of skirt-chasing, music, and Romanticism that is kept alive by Kundera's own digressions on figures such as this poet and this composer. Amidst these digressions is a tapestry of beautiful images, failed dreams, and tainted memories that can only come from a long life of reflection, art, and moral intuition. In one great passage, Josef spots his watch on the wrist of his brother, and then compares his return to that of a dead man returning from the grave twenty years later and finding his possessions divvied up among his survivors; another passage features the bittersweetness of nostalgia as "the captive, conquered present overcome by the past." That is not to say that the world of Kundera – who turns eighty-five today – is not tinged with hope: he remains, in fact, incorrigibly optimistic about the future of art while rightly attacking the trendy nonsense with which the twentieth century was saturated. Long-time Kundera readers have realized that each successive work seems to be a summary of his previous output, at once more precisely tied to his experiences and more abstractly philosophical, and we read and are transported to all the right points of the past. Even if most of them aren't really there anymore.