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

We’re canceling. Meetings, dates, protests in which we were planning to participate: canceled. The party has been canceled, the wedding too. And though we claim otherwise, hand over our heart, we’re not postponing anything. None of that dilatory hypocrisy—we’re canceling! So much for the Palme d’or I was supposed to receive for the movie of my life; I’ve just canceled on Cannes.

We’re canceling. Our schedule is a tissue of illusory promises. But we were going to open wide for the orthodontist, chaperone a class trip to the Cîteaux Abbey, negotiate an export contract on plumbing valves with a wily Japanese distributor: the whole delightful agenda, abandoned. The future will not be weighed down by any plans, any festivities; all the days the Lord has made (and he made plenty, the old sod, said Alphonse Allais) are now reserved for menace and peril.

Now, the anxiety that comes with menace and peril doesn’t prevent us from also feeling that bitter yet very real pleasure of cancellation. Because everything that must be experienced, everything we have to make time for, these patiently constructed plans, all these prospects disturb us too. Simply because it’s coming, because it’s inescapable, because there’s no way to get past it without going through it, the smallest scheduled event vexes us like a dark omen.

But if the best guest is the one who knows when to leave, why put up with the oysters and wine and smiles prior to parting ways? We’re beginning to realize that the principle of general and systematic cancellation has its advantages. At last, no more swimming lessons. At last we’re exempt from military service. Here we are, discharged and returned to our homes: what relief!

For that’s the form the pleasure of cancellation takes: relief. The burden of days to come is lifted from our shoulders. I’ll borrow Xavier de Maistre’s armchair, because “what a splendid piece of furniture an armchair is, of utmost importance and usefulness for every contemplative man.” Let’s contemplate, then. There are so many things we would cancel if we still could. All of them, perhaps. If only the principle worked retroactively! A clean slate on which to start over. Or to abstain from starting anything at all—simply to enjoy the relief, the immense relief that follows.

Now, take a page from my agenda: cancel your funeral.

Until tomorrow.

Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker

(20 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: “Cancelled!” by seanfoneill. Reproduced under CC BY-ND 2.0 license.