"Self-portrait with Radiator"

       I received a package in the mail this week--my mother sent me two books, a linen napkin and a silk scarf.  The books are what  I want to talk about--they arrived like lifelines.  Both by the same French author, Christian Bobin, whose other book (one among very many) To Rise Again is one of the most beautiful things I have ever read, and which also contains, for me, this imperative:  this is how you must write.  Mom had told me that Self-Portrait with Radiator was just as good as To Rise Again, which was almost hard to believe but you want to believe it could be true, and she sent it, along with The Simple Enchantment (all translations mine--oh yeah, I forgot to mention the books are in French.  And that I'm a francophone.  Well, now you know.)   They got here right in time.

 

      It dawned on me recently that most of my recent posts are a little, well, melancholy, and that this doesn't paint an accurate portrait of my days.   There is sadness, yes--but this sadness isn't lacking in beauty, isn't unpleasant company, and comes with a crowd of joyful playmates. 

As an illustration, I decided to share with you my translations of favourite passages from Self-Portrait with Radiator, which is a luminous book that skips and splashes like a trout in a brook.
 
 
 
Monday, April 8th
 
     Upon waking I immediately look for what is necessary for the day to be a day:  a bit of merriment.  I search without searching.  It can come from anywhere.  It is given in a second for the entire day.
 
     Merriment, what I name thus, is minuscule and unpredictable.  A little hammer of light hitting the bronze of what is real.  The note which comes out of it, spreads in the air, over the neighbourhood and far away.
 
     When we are merry, God wakes up.
 
Tuesday, April 9th
 
     To the embarrassing question: what are you writing these days, I answer that I write about flowers, and that some other day I will choose, if possible, another subject that will be even slighter and more humble.  A cup of black coffee.  The adventures of a cherry tree leaf.  But for now, there is much to see:  nine tulips stifling their laughter in a clear vase.  I watch them trembling beneath the wings of passing time.  They have a shining way of being defenseless, and I write this sentence, which they dictate: "What is an event is what is alive, and what is alive is what doesn't shield itself from loss."
 
Friday, April 19th

      The smell of freshly-cut grass,  below the buildings,  brings the day to the height of its glory.  All else that will come will be superfluous.  One could say that this is making a big deal out of very little, but consider--money, success, work, reading and loving, none of these give such intense rapture as this handful of cut grasses, putting their small fragrant souls into the hands of the air.

 

(more to come...)