READING ANNIE ERNAUX
Things Seen.
1993 - June 17. "...This scene is out of place in the increasingly prim and proper Trois-Fontaines Shopping Center. Like the beggar in the subway, people look elsewhere."
August 25. "Seeing PARIS written on a blue background, just as I was taking the road leading to highway A15, suddenly filled me with astonishment, with happiness. For the first time, I was reading this name on the sign with my imagination at age fifteen, when I had never yet gone to Paris, when the city was a dream. A rare moment, when the sensation of the past recurs in the present, superimposes itself."
September 1. "A mother and daughter are walking along the subway platform, the daughter clinging to the mother's arm. A gesture of times past, from the country: girls who walked along the main street like that, on Sundays, to protect themselves from the world and the groups of boys hanging out in front of the movie theater."
September 10. "Today at noon. I am sitting in the living room, eyes closed. I hear cars going by on the wet road below. A truck. I picture the sloping garden, the white fence, the street. In my head a sentence forms, "the constant hum of cars, and the longer sound of tires screeching on the damp pavement," with which surely I will do nothing. Simple habit of putting the world into words."
November 22. "On France Inter, on the radio this morning: …
Two homeless people have died of the cold, one at Mureaux in Yvelines, the other in La Rochelle.
According to the Prime Minister, "the economy seems to be getting onto the right track again."
December 1. "Condoms are a franc apiece in all pharmacies. An attractive price. But not the place: always the white blouse on the other side of the counter inquiring: "what would you like?" To answer "two condoms," is to confess in a pharmacy, before everyone, that you are going to make love. Only vending machines liberate."
1995 - Early July. "First decree by a mayor forbidding begging and "lying down" in public. This was bound to happen. So we can finally hide those people ho exhibit their shapeless bodies, near the unfashionable bottle of cheap red wine, the sight of which offends tourists seated at café terraces."
"Lying down," the position of love, sleep, and death. of abandonment and tike stopped. A vision that denies civilization and progress. Temptation."
December 24. "Today, Christmas Eve, returning from the fish market, I gave ten francs to a man collapsed near the garbage bags at the to[p of the steps leading down to the RER station. A face ravaged by poverty and alcohol. He smelled very bad. "Happy Christmas!" he cried. I replied mechanically "you too." Afterwards I was so disgusted with myself that to erase the shame, I wanted to wrap myself up in his coat, kiss his hands, smell his breath."
1998
April 9. A guest on France Inter: the director of ADIE, the Association for the Right to Economic Initiative. What we hear immediately is the voice, not what it says. A voice that articulated each word, the way people do in Neuilly, a voice that does not speak, that pronounces. That does not know what it is to live on three thousand five hundred francs a month, let alone ten thousand.
For the first time today, at Auchan, I did not put the packaged bread that I no longer wanted back in the place where I'd taken it, too far away. I put it discreetly on the bags of v=cat litter. Ashamed of behaving this way, I imagine hundreds of products abandoned all over the place, deli meats left in shoes... etc. Customers no longer accepting the order imposed by the superstore -...April 11. Memories in black and white of childhood, of all the years up to 1968. Memories in color afterwards.
April 12. First novel is reminiscent of "first dance." Forty years ago, middle class girls awaited this event to make their entry into society. Now they wait to make their entry with their first literary work: this is an improvement.
June 2, 2008. Peculiar silence in the RER CARS, which are nevertheless full, min early morning, around seven o'clock. As if people had brought along with them their unfinished night. In the evening the reverse:...
