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

 

Meanwhile, outside, nature takes its course. Today all our landscapes resemble a Chernobylian Eden. Animal species threatened by poaching, deforestation, and man’s innumerable destructive activities are reassembling their packs, their flocks, their herds, their hordes. A drone reportedly captured an image of a dodo frolicking in the Loir-et-Cher region. Or was it a baby phoenix?

We’re no longer emitting greenhouse gases, just a little dry cough that won’t even inconvenience the orangutan. Because I love my fellow man and do not want for amour-propre, I won’t say it brings me joy to see humanity so diminished. Nonetheless, La Fontaine has written us a caustic new fable, one whose moral is worthy of meditation. If the pangolin is indeed the virus’s vector, we won’t look at it quite so hungrily anymore. I’m quite certain it prefers a checkered past to a chopping board.

So, for the time being, it’s man who doesn’t come out from his burrow. Stags and does are rediscovering the pleasures of long walks in the forest. The panda is pleased to announce the birth of his first son and heir apparent. The air apparently vibrates with birdsong. And what about that engine you’re hearing? That’s the purr of a Sumatran tiger.

Do you think the grasshoppers will return to rattle in the wild grass? That we’ll once again see two butterflies dancing together on the gentle air? I had filed away these fading images along with my other childhood memories; when I told my daughters about them, they thought I was making it all up. They know I have a healthy imagination. They’ve seen me drunk.

Now it’s man who is conspicuously absent. The encroachment of saps and roots overpowers and undermines our most arrogant feats of engineering. Yesterday the Arc de Triomphe lay down to take a load off. The Mona Lisa is wearing a crown of morning glory. Raccoons are using their agile hands to pick up cable reels from abandoned construction sites, wrap them in ribbons of asphalt found on our useless roads, and hurl them to the bottoms of ravines.

Mosses filter polluted water from the rivers. Salmon no longer rust when they get wet. Seabird guano is starting to fertilize the drifting continent of discarded plastics in the ocean; with a little bit of time and patience—which the planet can spare at last—it might become habitable. Tortoises will go there to lay their eggs. Whales will draw up alongside it to offload their cargo of oil and ambergris before diving back down into water as blue as a smokeless sky.

I’d like to take a walk in that world one of these days.

Wouldn’t you?

Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker

(28 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: Grasshoppers, by Renee Grayson. Reproduced under CC-BY 2.0 license.