For three weeks beginning on March 19, the remarkably prolific and wildly imaginative French writer Éric Chevillard (M&L no. 8) kept a daily quarantine journal for Le Monde. (It has since moved to his blog, L’Autofictif, where he has mused that maybe he should change its name from “Sine die”—Latin for “indefinitely,” in the sense of postponement—to “Ad vitam æternam,” or “for eternity.”) Plenty of sheltered-in-place writers are doing similar work, of course, as he took care to remind us on day 15. But none have been so resolute, or so refreshing, in their refusal to take present conditions at face value. Instead, Chevillard is up to his old trick of finding a single loose thread in the fabric of daily life, winding it around a finger, and gently pulling until reality itself seems to unravel—a practice likely becoming, at the moment, more and more familiar to the rest of us.

—Daniel Levin Becker

Confinement’s strict discipline shows us who we really are. Here we are at last, beheld by our own four eyes. That’s right, four eyes, because at least two beings at once are incarnate in each of us. The first one is all nerves, pacing back and forth, biting his fingernails to the quick and then the bone, impatient and furious, while the other one philosophically lets his wise-old-sage beard grow (the metaphor works for comely young ladies too, age and gender meaning nothing anymore) and tries to find something positive in this radical experience.

These two don’t get along. They’d bite each other’s heads off if they were suppler in the pelvis. The sage urges the hothead to calm down, recommending meditation to exercise his mind. This only further angers the hothead, who challenges the sage to levitate, right here, right now, to prove his moral fortitude. The sage smiles a sad little smile, lets his beard grow ten more centimeters, and responds, laconically, “Om…” Which obviously sends the hothead over the edge: “Go empty yourself and give me some space!” he yells, at which point the neighbor starts banging on the wall (only to stop suddenly, no doubt called back from the brink by his inner Stoic).

Thus do we access the infinite resources hidden within. We’re not so simple after all! Montaigne knew himself to be “undulating and diverse,” and the same goes for me. This complexity is a delight. Even the hothead finds a certain vanity in it. He fixes his hair with his fingers before sticking two of them (the thumbs) under his armpits and beginning to stroll about, more gently now, in his living room. His rage subsides. He considers the situation less impatiently. He’ll endure this reclusion as long as he has to.

Meanwhile, though, some cracks have appeared in the serenity of our old sage. His complexion has clouded over. You’d think finding himself so undulating and diverse has made him seasick. He displays signs of nervousness. His gestures are quicker, jerkier. He wiggles his fingers and toes, and soon begins to stomp his feet as panic overtakes him. We watch as he tries to pull the elastic of his fake beard higher behind his ears, hoping it’ll at least serve as a protective mask. At the sight of which the hothead, currently quite quieted, lays a calming hand on his shoulder. And at last takes the fist to the face he’d been hoping for all along.

Until tomorrow.

Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker

(27 March 2020)

 

Éric Chevillard was born in 1964 in La Roche-sur-Yon in the west of France. He published his first novel, Mourir m’enrhume (Dying Gives Me a Cold), at the age of twenty-three, and has since gone on to publish more than twenty works of fiction, including The Crab Nebula, On the Ceiling, Palafox, Prehistoric Times, Demolishing Nisard, and The Author and Me. His novel The Brave Little Tailor is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Daniel Levin Becker is an editor, translator, and Oulipian based in Paris.

Banner: “Dualism” by Feliciano Guimarães. Reproduced under CC BY 2.0 license.