Happy days, in fact
Author as a kid in Gabon, West Africa
I must tell you upfront that I suffer from a severe psychological disorder: almost every morning I feel happy with life. When I walk the dog around 6:30 it dawns on me like dawn rises on earth. It’s in the air, from the lush grass through every leaf of the maple trees in summer, or in the icy wind of winter, when the bullmastiff buries his head in the snow and rolls in it like some gigantic puppy. And then he shakes himself furiously and starts walking again, briefly looking at me from the corner of the eye, with this perplex look that means:« Here he goes again, poor fellow, with his idiotic smile. Somehow, he will never learn. »
Right he is. It took me 40 years to overcome the sorrow of my brother’s death in Africa, where he drowned in a river under my eyes. He was four and I was five. On top of this, the equatorial forest and climate of Gabon offered in those early defining years everything one can dream of in terms of malaria fever and various bacterial related diseases. But I never ceased to love life, and this continent, where I went back briefly at the age of twenty-five, mainly to honor P. memory.
Everyone knows how utterly boring having to make a living is, and preparing for it can be. Back in France, parents sent me to school, not one day or one week, but for a decade or so. It took me several years to overcome the absurdity of this new life: strict discipline in an ugly school of an ugly provincial town. When I started university in Paris it was another world again. Excitement, mixed up with the feeling that I was definitely not properly formatted to master this environment.
But you don’t give a damn about it. In the meantime you have discovered reading and writing, and the happiness one feels in the countryside, where one goes back all summers and nearly every weekends, among woodlands and meadows, grooming the horses, wood cutting, tree planting, never tired of the birds around, of the scents of the earth. And the girl’s smiles…
Along the years you’re playing the rat race with some sort of distantiated interest, which is not what it takes obviously. You win some, you lose some. You make dreadful mistakes and life makes sure you pay for them dearly. You give your love and receive so much love in return that it is – and remains – bewildering. You trump the dullness of a salaried life by sneaking your way into some exciting moments: covering the Watergate scandal for your daily, swimming (briefly) in a river in Alaska, running like hell to save your skin in a little town of Nicaragua while a hidden sniper makes fun of you by shooting stones around your feet…
A certain kind of smile
That was past. But present and future times make me smile. A certain kind of smile. We are in for a rough ride indeed. There will be casualties and deaths. There are already broken lives and unnecessary suffering. We have abandoned our economy to the casino gamblers of finance and to the greed of bankers. Leaving them at the top of the economic system ended up in disaster in 2008. To overcome this failure, we tried to jump-start the economy by printing money. It does not work but will bear dire consequences tomorrow. We try to pass the bill to the populace, a risky business. We pay lip service to environmental considerations but keep exploiting the planet to the point of no return. Those are exciting times if you love a good fight, exciting times for who tries to make sense out of the current mess. Exciting times for those who want to defend the poor and try to convince the rich that if he does not reconsider his parameters, he risks losing it all. Exciting times because a state of chaos is a fountain of opportunities. And we shall be here to give a hand and share some thoughts about it.
