Papillon

J’aimerais bien partager un extrait du dernier livre que je viens de lire.

Le livre s’intitule Papillon, écrit en 1969 par Henri Charrière un ancien bagnard.

Papillon, le nom du livre est en faite le surnom de l’auteur Henri Charrière…

Cet homme qui dans les années 30, fut accusé d'un meurtre qu'il dit ne pas avoir commis.Il a été condamné au bagne à perpétuité. Et là commence alors une bataille sans relâche entre lui et l'administration pénitencier, grâce à sa farouche envie de vivre, celle de quitter "Le chemin de la pourriture", sa farouche envie de s’évader. Après multiple évasions échoués, celle de 1941 lui a permis de recouvrir définitivement sa liberté. Cet extrait est du Cinquième chapitre intitulé :

Le retour à la Civilisation.

Dans ce chapitre, Papillon exprime son profond regret, il regrette quitter les Indiens de Guajira qui l’ont accepté parmi eux.

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« So here I was, in a filthy hole that flooded twice a day. The heat was so stifling I took off my shirt, then my pants, then my shoes, and hung them all from the bars.

To think I’d gone fifteen hundred miles to fetch up here! Some great success that was.

God had been good to me, but it looked as if He was abandoning me now. Maybe He was angry because He’d already done the best He could do for me: He’d given me freedom, real freedom, and a community that adopted me completely. He’d given me not one but two wonderful wives. The sun and the sea. A hut in which I was lord and master. And a life with nature, an existence that may have been primitive, but so calm, so peaceful. He’d given me the unique gift of freedom without police, judges, or mean and envious men. And I hadn’t appreciated it.

The blue of the sea____when it wasn’t green or almost black____those dawns and sunsets that brought such sweet serenity, living without money yet lacking nothing essential ___all that I had spurned. And for what? A society that had no intention of helping me. Men who couldn’t be bothered to find out if I was worth salvaging. A world that had rejected me and cast me beyond the reach of hope, into holes like this, where they had only one thing on their minds: to kill me off, no matter what.

When the news of my capture got out, they’d have a good laugh over it___those twelve cheeseheads on the jury, that rat Polein, the cops and the prosecutor. For there was bound to be some journalist who’d send the news to France.

And what about my own people? When the police announced my escape, they must have been so happy to learn that their boy had given his executioners the slip!

And when they learned I’d been caught once more, they’d suffer over again.

I’d been wrong to renounce my tribe. Yes, I have every right to say « my tribe, » for they had truly adopted me. I’d been wrong and I deserved my fate. And yet…I hadn’t done a cavale in order to increase the Indian population of South America!

Dear God, you’ve got to realize that I must live among civilized people and show them I’m capable of taking part in their lives without being a threat to them. That’s my real goal__with or without Your help.

I must prove that I can be, that I am and will be, a normal person. Perhaps no better, but certainly no worse than the rest. »

Du livre:Se dire c'est tout dire, Jeans-Paul Desbiens

Instantannés

Cette femme qui me dit : « J'ai élevé huit enfants : sept filles, un garçon. Je les

ai tous eus à la maison (J'ai accouché à la maison). J'ai été 18 ans veuve. J'ai tricoté des bas. J'en ai vendu jusqu'à Baie-Comeau. Pendant quatre ans, j'ai pris soin de

mon beau-père handicapé. J'ai enterré cinq personnes. Et, dans ce temps-là, on

exposait les corps à la maison. Quand mes enfants se mariaient, je leur donnais

chacun 1000$. À Noël, l'an dernier, je leur ai encore donné chacun 100$. »

Huit enfants : 72 mois enceinte. Plus 18 ans de veuvage. Elle a 72 ans. Et elle

trouve encore à pleurer la mort d'un beau-frère qui vient de mourir à 79 ans. Un

être riche, c'est comme ça.

The American Fear Of Literature

This text is an extract from An American Primer a book edited by Daniel J.Boorstin.

In fact this book is a brilliantly comprehensive gathering of the most important documents of the American past...

Sinclair Lewis

The American Fear Of Literature

1930

Were I to express my feeling of honor and pleasure in having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I should be fulsome and perhaps tedious, and I present my gratitude with a plain «Thank you».

I wish, in this address, to consider certain trends, certain dangers, and certain high and exciting promises in present-day American literature. To discuss this with complete and unguarded frankness - and I should not insult you by being otherwise than completely honest, however indiscreet - it will be necessary for me to be a little impolite regarding certain institutions and persons of my own greatly beloved land.

But I beg of you to believe that I am in no case gratifying a grudge. Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities. Now and then I have, for my books or myself, been somewhat warmly denounced - there was one good pastor in California who upon reading my Elmer Gantrydesired to lead a mob and lynch me, while another holy man in the state of Maine wondered if there was no respectable and righteous way of putting me in jail. And, much harder to endure than any raging condemnation, a certain number of old acquaintances among journalists, what in the galloping American slang we call the «I Knew Him When Club », have scribbled that since they know me personally, therefore I must be a rather low sort of fellow and certainly no writer. But if I have now and then received such cheering brickbats, still I, who have heaved a good many bricks myself, would be fatuous not to expect a fair number in return.

No, I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.

I can illustrate by an incident which chances to concern the Swedish Academy and myself and which happened a few days ago, just before I took the ship at New York for Sweden. There is in America a learned and most amiable old gentleman who has been a pastor, a university professor, and a diplomat. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and no few universities have honored him with degrees. As a writer he is chiefly known for his pleasant little essays on the joy of fishing. I do not Suppose that professional fishermen, whose lives depend on the run of cod or herring, find it altogether an amusing occupation, but from these essays I learned, as a boy, that there is something very important and spiritual about catching fish, if you have no need of doing so.

This scholar stated, and publicly, that in awarding the Nobel Prize to a person who has scoffed at American institutions as much as I have, the Nobel Committee and the Swedish Academy had insulted America. I don't know whether, as an ex-diplomat, he intends to have an international incident made of it, and perhaps demand of the American Government that they land Marines in Stockholm to protect American literary rights, but I hope not.

I should have supposed that to a man so learned as to have been made a Doctor of Divinity, a Doctor of Letters, and I do not know how many other imposing magnificences, the matter would have seemed different; I should have supposed that he would have reasoned, «Although personally I dislike this man's books, nevertheless the Swedish Academy has in choosing him honored America by assuming that the Americans are no longer a puerile backwoods clan, so inferior that they are afraid of criticism, but instead a nation come of age and able to consider calmly and maturely any dissection of their land, however scoffing.»

I should even have supposed that so international a scholar would have believed that Scandinavia, accustomed to the works of Strindberg, Ibsen, and Pontoppidan, would not have been peculiarly shocked by a writer whose most anarchistic assertion has been that America, with all her wealth and power, has not yet produced a civilization good enough to satisfy the deepest wants of human creatures.

I believe that Strindberg rarely sang the «Star-Spangled Banner» or addressed Rotary Clubs, yet Sweden seems to have survived him.

I have at such length discussed this criticism of the learned fisherman not because it has any conceivable importance in itself, but because it does illustrate the fact that in America most of us - not readers alone but even writers - are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues. To be not only a best seller in America but to be really beloved, a novelist must assert that all American men are tall, handsome, rich, honest, and powerful at golf; that all country towns are filled with neighbors who do nothing from day to day save go about being kind to one another; that although American girls may be wild, they change always into perfect wives and mothers; and that, geographically, America is composed solely of New York, which is inhabited entirely by millionaires; of the West, which keeps unchanged all the boisterous heroism of 1870; and of the South, where everyone lives on a plantation perpetually glossy with moonlight and scented with magnolias.

It is not today vastly more true than it was twenty years ago that such novelists of ours as you have read in Sweden, novelists like Dreiser and Willa Cather, are authentically popular and influential in America. As it was revealed by the venerable fishing Academician whom I have quoted, we still most revere the writers for the popular magazines who in a hearty and edifying chorus chant that the America of a hundred and twenty million population is still as simple, as pastoral, as it was when it had but forty million; that in an industrial plant with ten thousand employees, the relationship between the worker and the manager is still as neighborly and uncomplex as in a factory of 1840, with five employees; that the relationships between father and son, between husband and wife, are precisely the same in an apartment in a thirty-story palace today, with three motor cars awaiting the family below and five books on the library shelves and a divorce imminent in the family next week, as were those relationships in a rose-veiled five-room cottage in 1880; that, in fine, America has gone through the revolutionary change from rustic colony to world empire without having in the least altered the bucolic and Puritanic simplicity of Uncle Sam.

I am, actually, extremely grateful to the fishing Academician for having somewhat condemned me. For since he is a leading member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he has released me, has given me the right to speak as frankly of that Academy as he has spoken of me. And in any honest study of American intellectualism today, that curious institution must be considered.

Before I consider the Academy, however, let me sketch a fantasy which has pleased me the last few days in the unavoidable idleness of a rough trip on the Atlantic. I am sure that you know, by now, that the award to me of the Nobel Prize has by no means been altogether popular in America. Doubtless the experience is not new to you. I fancy that when you gave the award even to Thomas Mann, whose Zauberberg seems to me to contain the whole of intellectual Europe, even when you gave it to Kipling, whose social significance is so profound that it has been rather authoritatively said that he created the British Empire, even when you gave it to Bernard Shaw, there were countrymen to those authors who complained because you did not choose another.

And I imagined what would have been said had you chosen some American other than myself. Suppose you had taken Theodore Dreiser.

Now to me, as to many other American writers, Dreiser more than any other man, marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life. Without his pioneering, I doubt if any of us could, unless we liked to be sent to jail, seek to express life and beauty and terror.

My great colleague Sherwood Anderson has proclaimed this leadership of Dreiser. I am delighted to join him. Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie, which he dared to publish thirty long years ago and which I read twenty-five years ago, came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman.

Yet had you given the Prize to Mr. Dreiser, you would have heard groans from America; you would have heard that his style - I am not exactly sure what this mystic quality «style» may be, but I find the word so often in the writings of minor critics that I suppose it must exist - you would have heard that his style is cumbersome, that his choice of words is insensitive, that his books are interminable. And certainly respectable scholars would complain that in Mr. Dreiser's world, men and women are often sinful and tragic and despairing, instead of being forever sunny and full of song and virtue, as befits authentic Americans.

And had you chosen Mr. Eugene O'Neill, who has done nothing much in American drama save to transform it utterly, in ten or twelve years, from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor and fear and greatness, you would have been reminded that he has done something far worse than scoffing - he has seen life as not to be neatly arranged in the study of a scholar but as a terrifying, magnificent, and often quite horrible thing akin to the tornado, the earthquake, the devastating fire.

And had you given Mr. James Branch Cabell the Prize, you would have been told that he is too fantastically malicious. So would you have been told that Miss Willa Cather, for all the homely virtue of her novels concerning the peasants of Nebraska, has in her novel,The Lost Lady, been so untrue to America's patent and perpetual and possibly tedious virtuousness as to picture an abandoned woman who remains, nevertheless, uncannily charming even to the virtuous, in a story without any moral; that Mr. Henry Mencken is the worst of all scoffers; that Mr. Sherwood Anderson viciously errs in considering sex as important a force in life as fishing; that Mr. Upton Sinclair, being a Socialist, sins against the perfectness of American capitalistic mass production; that Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer is un-American in regarding graciousness of manner and beauty of surface as of some importance in the endurance of daily life; and that Mr. Ernest Hemingway is not only too young but, far worse, uses language which should be unknown to gentlemen; that he acknowledges drunkenness as one of man's eternal ways to happiness, and asserts that a soldier may find love more significant than the hearty slaughter of men in battle.

Yes, they are wicked, these colleagues of mine; you would have done almost as evilly to have chosen them as to have chosen me; and as a chauvinistic American - only, mind you, as an American of 1930 and not of 1880 - I rejoice that they are my countrymen and countrywomen, and that I may speak of them with pride even in the Europe of Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, Galsworthy, Knut Hamsun, Arnold Bennett, Feuchtwanger,Selma Lagerlöf, Sigrid Undset, Verner von Heidenstam, D'Annunzio, Romain Rolland.

It is my fate in this paper to swing constantly from optimism to pessimism and back, but so is it the fate of anyone who writes or speaks of anything in America - the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today.

Thus, having with no muted pride called the roll of what seem to me to be great men and women in American literary life today, and having indeed omitted a dozen other names of which I should like to boast were there time, I must turn again and assert that in our contemporary American literature, indeed in all American arts save architecture and the film, we - yes, we who have such pregnant and vigorous standards in commerce and science - have no standards, no healing communication, no heroes to be followed nor villains to be condemned, no certain ways to be pursued, and no dangerous paths to be avoided.

The American novelist or poet or dramatist or sculptor or painter must work alone, in confusion, unassisted save by his own integrity.

That, of course, has always been the lot of the artist. The vagabond and criminal François Villon had certainly no smug and comfortable refuge in which elegant ladies would hold his hand and comfort his starveling soul and more starved body. He, veritably a great man, destined to outlive in history all the dukes and puissant cardinals whose robes he was esteemed unworthy to touch, had for his lot the gutter and the hardened crust.

Such poverty is not for the artist in America. They pay us, indeed, only too well; that writer is a failure who cannot have his butler and motor and his villa at Palm Beach, where he is permitted to mingle almost in equality with the barons of banking. But he is oppressed ever by something worse than poverty - by the feeling that what he creates does not matter, that he is expected by his readers to be only a decorator or a clown, or that he is good-naturedly accepted as a scoffer whose bark probably is worse than his bite and who probably is a good fellow at heart, who in any case certainly does not count in a land that produces eighty-story buildings, motors by the million, and wheat by the billions of bushels. And he has no institution, no group, to which he can turn for inspiration, whose criticism he can accept and whose praise will be precious to him.

What institutions have we?

The American Academy of Arts and Letters does contain, along with several excellent painters and architects and statesmen, such a really distinguished university president as Nicholas Murray Butler, so admirable and courageous a scholar as Wilbur Cross, and several first-rate writers: the poets Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, the free-minded publicist James Truslow Adams, and the novelists Edith Wharton, Hamlin Garland, Owen Wister, Brand Whitlock, and Booth Tarkington.

But it does not include Theodore Dreiser, Henry Mencken, our most vivid critic, George Jean Nathan, who, though still young, is certainly the dean of our dramatic critics, Eugene O'Neill, incomparably our best dramatist, the really original and vital poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Carl Sandburg, Robinson Jeffers and Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology was so utterly different from any other poetry ever published, so fresh, so authoritative, so free from any gropings and timidities that it came like a revelation and created a new school of native American poetry. It does not include the novelists and short-story writers, Willa Cather, Joseph Hergesheimer, Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, Louis Bromfield, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Fannie Hurst, Mary Austin, James Branch Cabell, Edna Ferber, nor Upton Sinclair, of whom you must say, whether you admire or detest his aggressive socialism, that he is internationally better known than any other American artist whosoever, be he novelist, poet, painter, sculptor, musician, architect.

I should not expect any Academy to be so fortunate as to contain all these writers, but one which fails to contain any of them, which thus cuts itself off from so much of what is living and vigorous and original in American letters, can have no relationship whatever to our life and aspirations. It does not represent the literary America of today - it represents only Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

It might be answered that, after all, the Academy is limited to fifty members; that, naturally, it cannot include every one of merit. But the fact is that while most of our few giants are excluded, the Academy does have room to include three extraordinarily bad poets, two very melodramatic and insignificant playwrights, two gentlemen who are known only because they are university presidents, a man who was thirty years ago known as a rather clever, humorous draughtsman, and several gentlemen of whom - I sadly confess my ignorance - I have never heard.

Let me again emphasize the fact - for it is a fact - that I am not attacking the American Academy. It is a hospitable and generous and decidedly dignified institution. And it is not altogether the Academy's fault that it does not contain many of the men who have significance in our letters. Sometimes it is the fault of those writers themselves. I cannot imagine that grizzly bear Theodore Dreiser being comfortable at the serenely Athenian dinners of the Academy, and were they to invite Mencken, he would infuriate them with his boisterous jeering. No, I am not attacking - I am reluctantly considering the Academy because it is so perfect an example of the divorce in America of intellectual life from all authentic standards of importance and reality.

From the book All is mind by David Samuel

While observing yourself, you can see that what you think you believe is not what
you really believe. Why didn't you notice this discrepancy before? Because
awareness of all the contradictions in your belief system would be difficult to bear.
In order to function without feeling guilt or remorse over your contradictory
behaviour, the mind has created buffers in your subconscious. It is buffers that
prevent you from seeing your internal contradictions.
A buffer is something that absorbs the shock when two objects crash together,
preventing or reducing the damage. Buffers are fully automatic like the heart.
Buffers send out flares that distract your attention from noticing incompatible
actions with your beliefs about yourself. The most obvious buffers are the
justifications and memory lapses that obliterate your actions from your mind.
Caught in a lie, for instance, you may justify your actions or change the topic of
conversation rather than see yourself as a liar. If you do acknowledge your lie at the
moment, you will most probably quickly forget about the situation. Some people
don't forget, and they hold the problem with them, causing the mind to be
preoccupied and fretting over unfinished business. That is draining, so buffers can be
useful to the productive modern person in that they distract your mind from being
preoccupied with one thought from the past rather than moving on. In a way they
can help you let go of needless thoughts.
Of course that can be a very destructive effect of buffers since it allows us to
commit acts that are harmful to ourselves and others and not have any conscience
about them so we can commit the same act again and again. Buffers can as well
mal-function just like any organ and work for us or against us.
Another buffer effect is someone who has a short attention span, jumping from one
activity to another. Simple things like reading a magazine, going for coffee,
watching TV instead of tackling some pending tasks could be distracting buffers. All
of a sudden you may feel the need to go for a walk when an argument is brewing. In
many situations, buffers are the cause of avoidance.
Buffers often work against us. If you don't think much of yourself and achieve
something of great value, you may come up with some self-deprecating comments or
just put down your success to luck, unrepeatable as an experience and deny yourself
the credit you deserve. This perpetuates low self-esteem. These are of course only
examples which you can adjust to fit your own life to test the principle.
Buffers can help you concentrate. Many people can get so focused in reading
something, or watching a show or any activity, that you can talk to them and they
just don’t hear or know you are there at all. Funny enough, they may even respond
and not recall that later. This can be a very good ability of concentration, but it can
also be a buffer that just does not want to deal with who is talking to them or what
they may be talking about. It is not hard to know the difference between a buffer
and good concentration.
Buffers are also very good at blame. If you do something and you know it is your
own fault, a buffer can give you all sorts of reasons why another person is to blame,
turning the spotlight off you and put it on another person. Funny enough, this is a
very common event for not only average people, but for people who profess to be
on a path. When they are going against their path, they may find all sorts of
excuses and reasons that it was not their fault but circumstances or someone else
who triggered it.
If you have a negative or confrontational nature, buffers will always find ways to
blame another person for getting you upset even though it is fully in your control to
be upset or not. Buffers are very good tricksters except that they often only trick
their host. Other people can see what is going on in the justification and so a fight
develops when more buffers come up to justify the buffers that caused the conflict.
Buffers will not stop until they are clearly seen and you refuse to listen to their
tricks.
Buffers can only function in mental darkness. They are like the monster that
vanishes when the lights are turned on. If you can see a buffer in action, then it no
longer has its power to distract your mind. Buffers are the original illusionist,
getting your attention with one hand while moving the objects with the other.
We cannot change anything if we do not see what is happening. If you want to
change then you have to see your true nature. In order to do this you must
eliminate or reduce the buffers in your mind. Then you can see the fragmentation,
because that is another activity of buffers, to hide us from seeing our fragmentation
and self-lying. When the buffers are seen and reduced, then fragmentation
becomes more visible, then unification can proceed.
To reduce buffers, enlist the aid of anyone close to you who can point out when you
act contradictory or justify any incorrect actions additionally, use the 5 Questions
each night to review your day. Continued practice will begin to open your mind to
the objective reality of what you are like. You may not like what you see, and then
buffers will jump up to do their job and distracted or justify so that you do not feel
the pain. Stick with the thought, pursue the observation until you learn to live with
your actions, and of course in seeing what you are doing, you will naturally reduce
the negative actions.
It is much harder to consciously stick the knife in your own belly than it is to do it
under hypnosis.


5 Questions
Ask yourself these 5 questions each night before going to sleep. actions of the day without regret or self indulgence. Merely actions objectively.
What did I do well today?
What did I do that I should not have done?
What didn’t I do that I should have done?
What did I do that I could have done better?
What do I want to do tomorrow?

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter, when reading the title I first thought that the issues discussed in the book will be mainly addressed to the American reader, I remember that I took a moment , hesitated for a while , and then asked : “How much ?"

Gave three dinars and went home…

After reading several pages, I realised that the book overpasses its title’s boundaries and for that reason, I decided to give you the opportunity to read some extracts with me…

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The Paranoid Style in American Politics

                                                          

                                                             Chapter 4:

Let us now abstract the basic elements in the paranoid style. The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life. One may object that there are conspiratorial acts in history, and there is nothing paranoid about taking note of them. This is true. All political behaviour requires strategy, many strategic acts depends for their effect upon a period of secrecy, and anything that is secret may be described, often with but little exaggeration, as conspiratorial. The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade.

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms; he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out. Like religious millenarians, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. “Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.” The apocalypticism of the paranoid style runs dangerously near to hopeless pessimism, but usually stops short of it. Apocalyptic warnings arouse passion and militancy, and strike at susceptibility to similar themes in Christianity. Properly expressed, such warnings serve somewhat the same function as a description of the horrible consequences of sin in a revivalist sermon: they portray that which impends but which may still be avoided. They are a secular and demonic version of Adventism.

As a member of the avant-grade who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet un-aroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised; in the manner of working politician. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for unqualified victories leads to the formulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same sense of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.