The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq

Author:Julien Gracq [Gracq, Julien]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Tags: French Literature, Fiction
ISBN: 9780231057882
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 1986-05-14T23:00:00+00:00

How poignant it was, that voice which bore the strange and funereal canticle out of the mists of time, like the rustling of a black veil over this joyous festival: that intimate voice which so naively alighted in the lugubrious tonality of its remote past. And I could not hear it without a shudder for all the secret panic it betrayed. Like a man in danger of death who finds his mother’s name on his lips, Orsenna at the moment of its as yet unrecognized dangers was seeking refuge in its deepest Mothers. Like a ship in the storm, which instinctively presents itself broadside to the waves, the city was reinvesting all its long history in a single cry, incorporating itself into it; confronting the Void, Orsenna was thereby assuming its lofty stature and its deepest difference; and for the first time, perhaps, coiled in a terrible vehemence, I was hearing the naked timbre of my own voice rising from its depths.

Meanwhile the chanting stopped: a more vigilant silence showed that the crowd’s emotion was now waiting for an intelligible sign to reach its climax, and that the officiating priest would now mount the pulpit. I watched him with the closest attention: he was wearing the white cassock of the southern monasteries, and something about him—his vague and myopic gaze, of a remote gentleness and yet of a maniacal concentration—suggested those redoubtable visionaries, like coals half devoured by the flame of mirages and the fire of the sands, whom Orsenna had seen appear so often on the desert’s fringe. Walking toward the pulpit, he swayed like a white flame between the rows of the congregation without touching anyone; then, when he had mounted the steps, the cluster of candles illuminated him from below and projected a harsh, predatory shadow over his jaws; the entire face seemed to rise to the unsettled surface of the night; there was an almost imperceptible stir among the congregation, as intimate as that of hands just touching one another, and I realized that the time of the prophets had returned.

He reminded us first in a neutral tone, expressing a kind of hesitation or exhaustion perhaps, of the particular importance which the liturgy accorded this festival, and he exulted, as at a particular sign of providential favor, that it could be celebrated this year with all its habitual luster in Saint John Damascene, “a voice among all the voices united on this night in the choir of the Church Militant to which was ever granted a special resonance and, in the heart of our people, a signal effectiveness.” After this colorless exordium, the voice paused and then rose, gradually sharper, clearer, like a blade slowly being drawn from its sheath.

“There is something deeply troubling, and for some among you there is a kind of bitter mockery, in the thought that this year it should be given us to celebrate this festival of expectation rewarded and of the divine exaltation of Hope upon a sleepless earth beneath

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