Goodbye - don't follow me ...
Tonight I have re-read Le Grand Meaulnes for the fourth time (in translation, obviously and sadly - why can't I read French? Is it too late to learn). Once again, I was astonished by it.
The two people I have talked to about LGM tonight on MSN both didn't know what it was or what it was about, so have a small synopsis (apologies to those who have read it for the inadequacy of this summary).
Le Grand Meaulnes is the only novel ever written by Alain-Fournier. It was published in 1912, but is set in 1890s France. The narrator of the story, Francois Seurel, is a schoolboy with a crippled knee whose peaceful life is disturbed by the advent of Augustin Meaulnes, who joins his father's school as a boarder. Swiftly nicknamed Le Grand Meaulnes, Augustin sets off on a schoolboy adventure with a borrowed horse and cart. Lost in the countryside, he finds his way to a mysterious chateau where a fete (sorry, don't know how to do accents on lj) is being held to celebrate the imminent return of the son and heir Frantz with his fiance. While at the chateau, Meaulnes meets a young woman with a 'pure profile', with whom he falls instantly and utterly in love. The fete, however, is interrupted by tragic news, and Meaulnes returns to school. He confides in Seurel and they both become committed to Meaulnes' quest to return to the mysterious house and the beautiful girl, a quest seemingly impossible to fulfill and which, as they grow through adolescence into adulthood, continues to consume their lives.
Two years after he published Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier was killed in the trenches of the First World War.
I. Love. This. Book. If you haven't read it, please read it now. I honestly believe you won't regret it. I know that it's been said that it's melodramatic and sentimental, and that's not unnecessarily untrue. But it is the most incredible portrait of growing up - of the magic of adolescence - of the tragic gulf between illusion and reality - of how fidelity to an unreal image can consume you - of how your childhood dreams of glamour and beauty become the tangled, tawdry mess that is adulthood - and of love, true and faithful and incredible love.
And of all the relationships in the book, it's the one between Meaulnes and Seurel that is love to me, consuming, ridiculous, faithful love. Seurel worships Meaulnes through the eyes of a younger, smaller, weaker schoolboy, and even when he learns to see him clearly, with his profound flaws, he never stops loving him. Even with the developing relationship with Yvonne, he never hates Meaulnes, never sees him as pathetic, as diminished from this golden, daring, glamorous figure of their schooldays. He loves him, always, totally, even when he knows that it'll never be him that Meaulnes takes with him on his adventures, that he will never be the unattainable reality for which Meaulnes yearns.
Isn't that love? It's love to me. Is there anything more pure, more painful, or more perfect than loving someone that you know you'll never be able to satisfy? Even if you know it's partly an image in your own mind that you love ... Who doesn't prefer a fleeting, unattainable glory to a mundane reality?
The whole thing is so associated in my mind with The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain, mainly because that novel was the first place I ever saw Le Grand Meaulnes mentioned, and partly because that novel was such an awakening for me - to literature, and to this concept of an unattainable, perfect love in the pursuit of which you destroy everything else, and yourself: "What I wanted to say was this: 'My whole future is you. There's nothing anywhere in any shape or form in my future life except you. I don't know why this has happened to me, but that's the way it's always going to be.'"
It's hard not to read it with Alain-Fournier's fate in mind, and it's harder to believe that he didn't have some prescient sense of what was going to happen to France (if not to him), because he writes about this world where the great adventure has ended, and good and evil are gone, and there's nothing left but dust.
Anyway, read it.
It's making me think too of this one image I can't get out of my head at the moment - from Tamsin's birthday picnic a few weeks ago, when the weather was amazing. S (who is a poet, a pagan, and on slight acquaintance, a bit of a twat, but very handsome) and A (who is none of those things, except the last) were arguing about something, but in a banter way, and S, who was topless at the time, crawled up behind A, who was fully clothed, and wrapped his arms around him from behind. Just in a boy way ... or a man way. No, definitely a boy way. And it was just this one brief moment in the sunshine, but for some reason it was one of the most intense and beautiful things I've seen for months. And I can't stop thinking about it.
I may have made a tactical error with my mother.
When we had dinner Friday night in Covent Garden, I might have told her that I was spending quite a lot of time thinking about suicide. Not in an 'I'm so depressed pity me savemesavemesaveme kind of way'. Just that the things I've been thinking recently have led me to the conclusion that suicide is the only rational course of action, but I'm not going to do it.
Now at the time, my mum cracked up, which made me laugh too, and it was fine. But then she phoned me on Sunday night to say she was worried about me, which is something she never really says. She thinks I really need to be on antidepressants, and that I shouldn't have stopped taking them last year. (Backstory: went on Prozac during my second year at Oxford, not an uncommon thing in that place, stopped taking it v. abruptly the summer before I went to do my MA. Last year I was so depressed I went to the doctor and demanded more, but only took it for about two months - barely enough time for it to kick in - before giving up on it again.)
See, the thing is, even when I was theoretically on it, I never took it properly. Only for about two months back during my time at Ox, when it really did save my life, or at least postpone my death. Or at least keep me from failing my degree. But after that I stopped taking it regularly enough, or pretended to my mum that I was taking it when I wasn't. Just let the pills expire in my drawer, and then stopped filling the prescriptions.
And now I really do need to be on it. I'm out of control. Doing stupid, awful things without even thinking about it or realising what I'm doing. But for one thing I have to go find a GP, and get registered here in London, and convince them to give me some, and keep going back, and ... how am I supposed to find the time to do that while I'm working (and getting paid by the hour)? And even if I do, how do I make myself take it? I don't even know why I don't. I want to feel better ... or at least function, which was what it always did for me before. But something in me just resists. Why is it so hard to do the things that save you?
On a lighter note, this MSN conversation with
biggster cracked me up, so I thought I would share it:
gauloise_girl: are you OK? i worry about you
biggster: Yeah. I'm fine. Nothing to worry about, at any rate.
gauloise_girl: still. i hate thinking of you being all depressed and apathetic.
gauloise_girl: that's MY territory.
biggster: We can fight for it.
biggster: If we can be bothered.
gauloise_girl: we should probably just wait and see which one of us wastes away first
biggster: I like your plan.
biggster: I'll totally win.
gauloise_girl: you do have a head start
biggster: a head start?
gauloise_girl: you're quite a bit thinner than me, g., i don't know if you've noticed
biggster: surely that would count against me?
biggster: By 'win' I meant that I'll stay alive longer.
gauloise_girl: oh. i was assuming 'win' meant dying.
gauloise_girl: ... i think i've just conclusively proved that i'm the most depressed.
biggster: i think you may have
The two people I have talked to about LGM tonight on MSN both didn't know what it was or what it was about, so have a small synopsis (apologies to those who have read it for the inadequacy of this summary).
Le Grand Meaulnes is the only novel ever written by Alain-Fournier. It was published in 1912, but is set in 1890s France. The narrator of the story, Francois Seurel, is a schoolboy with a crippled knee whose peaceful life is disturbed by the advent of Augustin Meaulnes, who joins his father's school as a boarder. Swiftly nicknamed Le Grand Meaulnes, Augustin sets off on a schoolboy adventure with a borrowed horse and cart. Lost in the countryside, he finds his way to a mysterious chateau where a fete (sorry, don't know how to do accents on lj) is being held to celebrate the imminent return of the son and heir Frantz with his fiance. While at the chateau, Meaulnes meets a young woman with a 'pure profile', with whom he falls instantly and utterly in love. The fete, however, is interrupted by tragic news, and Meaulnes returns to school. He confides in Seurel and they both become committed to Meaulnes' quest to return to the mysterious house and the beautiful girl, a quest seemingly impossible to fulfill and which, as they grow through adolescence into adulthood, continues to consume their lives.
Two years after he published Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier was killed in the trenches of the First World War.
I. Love. This. Book. If you haven't read it, please read it now. I honestly believe you won't regret it. I know that it's been said that it's melodramatic and sentimental, and that's not unnecessarily untrue. But it is the most incredible portrait of growing up - of the magic of adolescence - of the tragic gulf between illusion and reality - of how fidelity to an unreal image can consume you - of how your childhood dreams of glamour and beauty become the tangled, tawdry mess that is adulthood - and of love, true and faithful and incredible love.
And of all the relationships in the book, it's the one between Meaulnes and Seurel that is love to me, consuming, ridiculous, faithful love. Seurel worships Meaulnes through the eyes of a younger, smaller, weaker schoolboy, and even when he learns to see him clearly, with his profound flaws, he never stops loving him. Even with the developing relationship with Yvonne, he never hates Meaulnes, never sees him as pathetic, as diminished from this golden, daring, glamorous figure of their schooldays. He loves him, always, totally, even when he knows that it'll never be him that Meaulnes takes with him on his adventures, that he will never be the unattainable reality for which Meaulnes yearns.
Isn't that love? It's love to me. Is there anything more pure, more painful, or more perfect than loving someone that you know you'll never be able to satisfy? Even if you know it's partly an image in your own mind that you love ... Who doesn't prefer a fleeting, unattainable glory to a mundane reality?
The whole thing is so associated in my mind with The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain, mainly because that novel was the first place I ever saw Le Grand Meaulnes mentioned, and partly because that novel was such an awakening for me - to literature, and to this concept of an unattainable, perfect love in the pursuit of which you destroy everything else, and yourself: "What I wanted to say was this: 'My whole future is you. There's nothing anywhere in any shape or form in my future life except you. I don't know why this has happened to me, but that's the way it's always going to be.'"
It's hard not to read it with Alain-Fournier's fate in mind, and it's harder to believe that he didn't have some prescient sense of what was going to happen to France (if not to him), because he writes about this world where the great adventure has ended, and good and evil are gone, and there's nothing left but dust.
Anyway, read it.
It's making me think too of this one image I can't get out of my head at the moment - from Tamsin's birthday picnic a few weeks ago, when the weather was amazing. S (who is a poet, a pagan, and on slight acquaintance, a bit of a twat, but very handsome) and A (who is none of those things, except the last) were arguing about something, but in a banter way, and S, who was topless at the time, crawled up behind A, who was fully clothed, and wrapped his arms around him from behind. Just in a boy way ... or a man way. No, definitely a boy way. And it was just this one brief moment in the sunshine, but for some reason it was one of the most intense and beautiful things I've seen for months. And I can't stop thinking about it.
I may have made a tactical error with my mother.
When we had dinner Friday night in Covent Garden, I might have told her that I was spending quite a lot of time thinking about suicide. Not in an 'I'm so depressed pity me savemesavemesaveme kind of way'. Just that the things I've been thinking recently have led me to the conclusion that suicide is the only rational course of action, but I'm not going to do it.
Now at the time, my mum cracked up, which made me laugh too, and it was fine. But then she phoned me on Sunday night to say she was worried about me, which is something she never really says. She thinks I really need to be on antidepressants, and that I shouldn't have stopped taking them last year. (Backstory: went on Prozac during my second year at Oxford, not an uncommon thing in that place, stopped taking it v. abruptly the summer before I went to do my MA. Last year I was so depressed I went to the doctor and demanded more, but only took it for about two months - barely enough time for it to kick in - before giving up on it again.)
See, the thing is, even when I was theoretically on it, I never took it properly. Only for about two months back during my time at Ox, when it really did save my life, or at least postpone my death. Or at least keep me from failing my degree. But after that I stopped taking it regularly enough, or pretended to my mum that I was taking it when I wasn't. Just let the pills expire in my drawer, and then stopped filling the prescriptions.
And now I really do need to be on it. I'm out of control. Doing stupid, awful things without even thinking about it or realising what I'm doing. But for one thing I have to go find a GP, and get registered here in London, and convince them to give me some, and keep going back, and ... how am I supposed to find the time to do that while I'm working (and getting paid by the hour)? And even if I do, how do I make myself take it? I don't even know why I don't. I want to feel better ... or at least function, which was what it always did for me before. But something in me just resists. Why is it so hard to do the things that save you?
On a lighter note, this MSN conversation with
biggster cracked me up, so I thought I would share it:
gauloise_girl: are you OK? i worry about you
biggster: Yeah. I'm fine. Nothing to worry about, at any rate.
gauloise_girl: still. i hate thinking of you being all depressed and apathetic.
gauloise_girl: that's MY territory.
biggster: We can fight for it.
biggster: If we can be bothered.
gauloise_girl: we should probably just wait and see which one of us wastes away first
biggster: I like your plan.
biggster: I'll totally win.
gauloise_girl: you do have a head start
biggster: a head start?
gauloise_girl: you're quite a bit thinner than me, g., i don't know if you've noticed
biggster: surely that would count against me?
biggster: By 'win' I meant that I'll stay alive longer.
gauloise_girl: oh. i was assuming 'win' meant dying.
gauloise_girl: ... i think i've just conclusively proved that i'm the most depressed.
biggster: i think you may have