Héritier Françoise - The Sweetness of Life

Contents

The following text will surprise those who know me from my anthropological writings. In all humility, I claim that this is another of them: a fantasy born of my pen and inspirationand it has a story behind it. One fine summers day, if I may be allowed that expression, since the weather was appalling, I had a postcard from Scotland. A very dear friend, Professor Jean-Charles Piette, or Monsieur Piette as I privately think of him, was sending me a few words from the Isle of Skye. They began: A stolen weeks holiday in Scotland.

I must explain that this great clinical scientist, professor of internal medicine at the Hpital de La Piti and greatly loved by his patients, of whom I have been one for thirty years, lives only for them and his work. I have never known him not to be on the verge of physical and mental exhaustion, devoting hours to each patient, a doctor who is capable of accompanying the days last patient home if he or she has been kept waiting too long, or of going to meet another patients train (as he once did for me), who is capable of mad generosity and equally mad whims. And here he was, talking about a stolen week. It leapt to the eye. Who was stealing what? Was he stealing a little respite from a world to which he owed all he could do, or was he not, instead, letting his all-consuming circle of acquaintances, his obsession with his work, his many and overwhelming responsibilities, deprive him of his life? We are stealing his life from him, I thought, he is stealing his own life from himself.

So I began replying to him along these lines: every day you are missing out on what goes into making up the sweetness of life. And what does it do for you, apart from making you feel guilty for never doing enough? I began by setting down some major trails to follow, and soon entered into the spirit of the thing, seriously wondering what is, has been, and will, I am sure, continue to be the sweetness of my own life.

So what follows here is an enumeration, an ordinary list in one long sentence, of ideas that came to me of their own accord by fits and starts, like a long, whispered monologue. It is about sensations, perceptions, emotions, minor pleasures and major joys, sometimes profound disillusionment and even pain, although my mind dwells more readily on the luminous than on the somber moments in life (and there have been some of the latter). Beginning with small and very general things that we must all have felt were very real to us at some time or other, I have progressively drawn on private, lasting memories fixed forever in powerful mental images, dazzling snapshots of experience that can, I think, be conveyed in a few words. This essay should be seen as a kind of prose poem paying tribute to life.

It is true that I think I have not had too many problems in life. I have been lucky enough to deal, in my work, with intellectual questions that give depth and a singular touch of pleasure to everyday existence. I have enjoyed my work, and still do. I have also been lucky enough not to know poverty or, unlike millions of human beings today, enormous difficulty in simply surviving. What I have written here could therefore look like the hedonism of a woman who has led a privileged life. However, I will venture to think that, in describing pure sensuality, it evokes the actual experience of humanity in general.

The reader will become aware of the length of time involved. I was born before the Second World War, which made a great impression on me, although it did not entail much suffering on my own part. Indeed, it meant that during long holidays in this part of Auvergne that is now the Livradois National Park I became familiar with country life of a kind that is now in the past. I shall touch only lightly on the time I have spent in Africa and on my experience of illness. But many encounters will be found here, oddities, an attentive eye for nature and what it creates, for animals, noise, sounds, light and shade, aromas... and above all, other people.

The reader will not find glimpses of my private life in this essay, or very few of them. Nor will I dwell on the pleasures of the intellect, of research and writing, although those pleasures are intense. Or on love, although nonetheless it has played an important part in my life, as I suppose it will have done in those of readers. That was not my subject. What is it, then?

There is a kind of lightness and grace in the simple fact of existence, leaving aside our occupations, strong feelings, political and other commitments, and I wanted to confine my subject in this essay to that aspect. To the little plus factors that are granted to us all, and go to make up the flavor of life.

I was delighted to get your postcard yesterday and know that you were taking a holiday in that lovely place, an island to make anyone dream. You sounded happy in the mists of Scotland. All the same, you didnt steal your holiday in the sense of pilfering or misappropriating property. Instead, I would say that you are stealing from your own life every day.

If you assume an average life expectation of 85 years, or 31,025 days, always having, also on average, 8 hours of sleep a day; if you spend 3 hours 30 minutes on shopping, preparing, and eating meals, washing up after them, and so on; 1 hour 30 minutes on personal hygiene and grooming, sickness, etc.; 3 hours on keeping the family going: children, transport, interaction with other people, DIY work, etc.; 140 hours of work a month for 45 years at a rate of 6 hours a day, not counting the pleasure that work may give you; 1 hour a day for obligatory social relationships, conversations with the neighbors, having a drink, meetings, seminars, and so on; then how much time is left for the average citizen, male or female, to enjoy those activities that are the sweetness of life?

Going on holiday, to the theater, the cinema, the opera, concerts, exhibitions, reading, listening to music or playing it, various ways of taking exercise, walking, going on excursions, travel, gardening, visits to friends, relaxing, writing, creative arts, dreaming, reflection, sports (all of them), board games and party games, in fact games of any kind, doing crossword puzzles, resting, conversation, friendship, flirtation, love, and why not add guilty pleasures as well? Youll notice that I havent even mentioned sex. Youll never guess: in what we think of as the active or working period of our lives, you have 1 hour 30 minutes a day for all that, and between 5 and 7 hours after, because the time returned to the other tasks increases.

And there you go extending your working hours by taking time from everything else, and missing out on all those pleasant things to which our deepest selves aspire.

I left out a lot of things in my list of those that make up the sweetness of life. So I will go on, following the method of the Surrealists, by looking at associations of ideas and letting them come of their own accord. All this may strike you as hedonistic, since I have left out all the subtleties of intellectual pleasure, or what we feel in commitmentsand you may not even think it very serious if Im not going to mention sex. Nonetheless, some things are very serious and very necessary if we are to preserve our zest for life; Im talking about the intimate thrill of small pleasures, Im talking about questions and even setbacks if we give them time to exist. I will go on.

... I forgot about wild laughter, phone calls made for no real reason, handwritten letters, family meals (well, some of them), meals with friends, a beer at the bar, a glass of red or white wine, coffee in the sun, a siesta in the shade, eating oysters at the seaside or cherries straight from the tree, putting on a great show of anger, but only in pretense, making a collection (of stones, butterflies, boxes or cans, how would I know exactly what?), the bliss of fresh autumn evenings, sunsets, waking up at night when everyones asleep, trying to remember the words of old songs, searching for smells or tastes, reading the newspaper in peace, looking through photograph albums, playing with a cat, building an imaginary house, setting a place at table attractively, drawing casually on a cigarette, keeping a diary, dancing (ah, dancing!), going out to parties, going to the ball on National Day, listening to the New Year concert like millions of others, lounging on a sofa, strolling along the streets and window-shopping, trying on shoes, clowning around and doing imitations, setting out to explore a city you dont know, playing football or Scrabble or dominoes, devising puns and plays on words, talking nonsense, cooking a complicated dish, going angling or jogging or playing bowls, thinking all around an idea, watching an old film on TV or in an experimental art-house cinema, whistling with your hands in your pockets, keeping your mind vacant, moments of silence and solitude, running in warm rain, long conversations at twilight, kisses on the back of the neck, the smell of warm croissants in the street, winks of complicity, the moment when all nature falls silent... listening to the happy cries of children at play, feasting on ice cream or chocolates, those moments when you know that someone likes you, is looking at you and listening to you, feeling agile and sprightly, sleeping in late in the morning, getting on board a fishing boat, watching a craftsman at work, stopping to listen to a smooth talker peddling his wares (my goodness, that was a long time ago!), enjoying the sight of street life, getting back together with friends you havent seen for ages, really listening to other people...