Space-Time

Space-time is where I live, so that this question does not make much sense for me. Past and future are for me a reversible continuum: I certainly think a lot about the past, as in History, but that past is for me as alive, sometimes more so, as the “present”. Often the past has the colours of the future, and vice versa. Perhaps this is a consequence of my age, or of my still vivid imagination.

La Vallière

I was reading yesterday those pages of the Vicomte de Bragelonne, that describe the nascent love of Louis XIV, the young King of France, for Mademoiselle Louise de La Vallière, dame d’honneur to the King’s sister in law, Madame, wife of the duke of Orléans, Henriette d’Angleterre. The story reflects their past: Louis’ patient discarding of the grip the old Mazarin had on him during and long after the regency, and of the influence of the reine mère, Anne d’Autriche, and for Louise the sweet dreams of her childhood in Blois.

In the background many sinister plots are brewing, not least between the powerful bishop of Vannes, our old friend (or foe?) Aramis, and his patron the financier and séducteur Nicholas Fouquet. Those immortal pages of history, however fictional, display Dumas’ skills at playing with time, merging the recent past and the, since then, known future: reading Dumas is travelling through time, but not in linear fashion, rather back and forth.

Workspace

Space-time is to my mind the space for writers, and examples of such travel are abundant in both recent and older literature. Think for example of Dune and its sequels, of the work of Ernst Jünger, of Proust, of the novels of Haruki Murakami. So, rephrasing the prompt, I would gladly say: “I think much of both past and future, and the present is a fluid stage, hardly a workspace, rather a thin veil that does not succeed in masking either. There lie many sources of inspiration, not all fictional. Indeed, one may ask what is fiction in this context: premonition, mental reincarnation, or simply ability to see connections between (superficially) separate events, landscapes and characters.

Marcel

In the Owl, the narrator navigates effortlessly between his day life as a student, and the nocturnal walks though the woods or the city, with his perhaps imagined lover. So does Marcel in La Recherche, as history flows regardless as what we know as the first World War. I still think of our present time as that of inevitable confusion, as if we all suffered of myopia, as we try to decipher what is mostly an ugly oligarchic spectacle in the sense of Debord.

Dumas could write so clearly about the time of Louis XIV, both as professional historian and novelist, because those decades of French history were already part of the legend: his readers enjoyed the tale which took them away from the mediocrity of their time. We, by contrast, are struggling in the fog purposefully created by those modern myth makers, who are far from being as talented as Dumas!

A western disease

I wrote earlier about nostalgia. This arises when one’s only escape is to the past, as seen narrowly as the opposite to the present. Thus Dominique Venner, a once member of the OAS, wrote a De Gaulle, as the antinomy to the political mediocrity and stupidity of the decades that followed the great man. I do respect this view, and know that Venner was devastated as he observed the tragic decay of his/our country. For me it may well be that the journey into futures, and back to what is perceived as the past, is a trick to escape despair, a western disease.