A Dutiful Son by Pascal Bruckner

Author:Pascal Bruckner [Bruckner, Pascal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910213179
Publisher: Dedalus
Published: 2015-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The Great Awakeners

I’m twenty-one, I’m sitting in the sunshine, pen in hand, the window wide open onto Rue Guisarde, reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the French translation by Jean Hippolyte. My son Eric, hardly a few months old, is wailing in his cradle. We’re playing philosopher. I read out loud to him a few well-expressed sentences from the great German:

‘“Each self-consciousness seeks the death of the other.” Now what d’you think of that my little poppet?’

He babbles on without listening, chewing his rattle.

‘I can see you’re fascinated by that. Hey, look, here’s something that concerns you personally: “The birth of the child is the death of the parents.” D’you realise that means that our disappearance is structurally entailed in your arrival in the world. A bit discouraging, isn’t it? For me at any rate.’

After I’ve read out ten sentences he falls asleep or starts to cry. Hegel isn’t recommended for infants. The next day I’ll read him a bit of Schopenhauer or Heidegger, some scraps of Being and Time to sharpen his mind and imbue it with wisdom. We’re living with his mother, Violaine, an actress and primary school teacher, the daughter of a former fighter in the International Brigade who lost his leg on the Madrid front in 1937; it’s a 17-square-metre flat in the Mabillon District, one room with cooking facilities and seatless toilets on the landing. It’s 1970s France, sparing on soap and bathrooms. When, six months after he was born in 1970, my parents heard, with some excitement, of the existence of my son, all my father could think of to say was, ‘Thank God her mother’s not Jewish, Arab or African.’

The worst came first. They immediately became passionately attached to the child and wanted to take it over.

Violane and I are stony broke, in the evening she goes out into the streets to sing songs by Barbara, Jean Ferrat, Gilles Vigneault, some she’s written herself; I go round with the hat, I feel I’m the luckiest of men. I listen to Léo Ferré over and over again: ‘Avec le temps tout s’en va’ (With time everything goes), a song that’s devastating in its strength and simplicity. At an age when, with time, everything comes, everything arrives, especially the best things, I gorge on hypothetical unhappiness. I’ve failed the agrégation in philosophy and the competitive examination for the École Normale Superieure10 and I’m congratulating myself on that whilst my mother’s tearing her hair out. We’d heard so many people telling us that exams were going to disappear that I botched the tests. Now I’m assessing my good fortune in having escaped the path my colleagues will follow. Whether as a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure or as an agrégé, I would have had to endure the indifference of mocking pupils, climb the rungs of the career ladder and conform in order to please my superiors. I have taught, but later on and under different conditions. What I’ve gained in freedom I’ve lost in security.

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