… 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 pretence, making a collection (of stone, butterflies, boxes or cans, how would I know exactly what), the bliss of fresh autumn evenings, sunsets, waking up at night when everyone’s 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 and imaginary house, setting a place at table attractively, drawing casually on a cigarette, keeping a diary, dancing (ah, dancing!), going out to parties…. – Françoise Héritier, The Sweetness of Life, 2011
And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock will all reply: “It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.” – Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, XXXIII, 1869
I wish for nothing more than one thing: to return to solitude, anonymity, indifference to the world, the carelessness of childhood, afternoons in the garden, the birds, and when I used to dream of going to faraway countries, of knowing the world, of things happening to me. All that happened to me, and will happen to me again, perhaps, and yet I only want to return to that time when nothing had yet happened. Not to rediscover my desire and my dream, but precisely what I neither loved nor hated, which was my real life: the countryside, the distant sounds of cars, of a wood saw, my father’s voice, the barking of dogs, the ringing of the grocery store bell. Anything that makes me relive that – Venice on a Sunday morning, writing, love sometimes, in 1984 – is happiness. – Annie Ernaux, Juin 1988, Écrire la vie
Texts & Photos Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie
Les Douches la Galerie
5, rue Legouvé 75010 Paris
01.78.94.03.00
www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com
