Window on oneself

A read­er asked me a few days ago if I was such and such a char­ac­ter in my nov­el or if, in this oth­er, the sto­ry was not auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. Authors are prob­a­bly smil­ing as they read this. This ques­tion, how­ev­er obso­lete it may be, nev­er­the­less con­ceals a truth, even if it should not be made a gen­er­al­i­ty either.

First of all, it depends on what you write. We will ask these ques­tions dif­fer­ent­ly if we have in front of us an author who writes suc­cess­ful, sus­pense, fan­tas­tic or, like me, a more inti­mate story.

I can be described as an author behind closed doors, as is prob­a­bly my life. I am an author of the dai­ly news­pa­per, just as my exis­tence seems to be. My nov­els are entire­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal because I draw most of my inspi­ra­tion from the caul­dron of my expe­ri­ences, or from what I am told. These sto­ries are all the more mine as I focus pri­mar­i­ly on phi­los­o­phy, in the rit­u­al and reli­gious act of want­i­ng to cre­ate a sci­en­tif­ic mean­ing of some­thing that escapes me.

That’s why I get tired of sto­ries where the only pur­pose seems to enter­tain or strut with lit­er­ary finds (I just read such a recent­ly pub­lished book). If I was tempt­ed by the blus­ter, I believe I have man­aged at this stage of my life to wash away with bleach the slight­est pride.

My house, the real one, built with lines of cred­it, is improv­ing, lock­ing itself com­fort­ably on itself. Indeed, we can look out the win­dow into my mind, which is busy sort­ing through my desires, fan­tasies, fears and blas­phemies, joys, and futile aspi­ra­tions. I try to cre­ate a sem­blance of order, par­al­lel to my mind, sim­i­lar to this slow recon­struc­tion of this building.

I will always be like this. Sem­per ipse ero. On this only con­di­tion can I afford to write : to draw fer­tile fur­rows, and bury the seed of who I am.