An afternoon in the cemetery
Almost 40 years ago, The Smiths sang:
«Dreaded Sunny Day
So i meet you at the cemetery gates
Keats and Yeats Are on Your Side
While Wilde is on mine»
Morrissey got it right. Before Wilde, I was really on the side of Keats and Yeats. But besides the preference for the writers, what mattered most was the place. After all, a cemetery was the perfect site for a literary meeting, bathed by the sun, with a cheerful melody. The reunion with our authors is a living celebration, even with those who have already departed. As I wrote elsewhere, there is a relationship between death and reading that is accentuated with age.
For several years I have been visiting both the houses and the camps of my election authors and the cemeteries, unlike the thunderstorm environment with which they are often characterized, always seemed to me living places and pleasant.
In this spring, the good weather toasted Paris and, on a Soaphiro weekend, I first visited the Montparnasse Cemetery. The afternoon was hot and, at the entrance, a group of people surrounded the campaign of Sartre and Beauvoir, where various objects spread, including a bottle of champagne. The sloppy aspect of these honors reflected that of visitors and, of course, accelerated the step.
I followed the nominations of my list and the first visit was Baudelaire, because it made me all the way to start with the author of the Paris spleen. As the rest of the route was planning, I noticed a funeral background and the black spot that the funeral costumes of those present reminded me that there is also sadness and longing.
Among imposing deposits, true works of architectural art, and shallow camps, there are graves in which abandonment and some well -groomed and recently decorated with flowers are noted. Death and life, oblivion and memory, in a city within the city.
I changed around me and passed Chirac, Gainsbourg and people who walk, others who cross the cemetery as a shortcut or some that, sitting in the shadow of the trees, talked. Until I came to one of the top names on my list, whose campaign, curiously, was the hardest to find. Is Cioran, is it there « freely free »? I left him to his long-awaited tranquility to visit Dumézil, whose work so inspired me. I could not resist the irony of noticing that the theorist of Indo-European trifunctionality is in a campaign with his father and his son, totaling three people.
This was followed by another of the great, whose grave is stored by two threatening oxidized bronze snakes. Pierre Schoendoerffer was the « eternal soldier » and is one of my election directors. I remember your 317and Sectionbecause the adjudant Willsorff, by the way, Bruno Cremer, was the next visit. Even alongside the actor is an unexpected figure, Jacques Vergès, « The Devil’s Lawyer », known for defending Klaus Barbie or Carlos, the Chacal.
At the bottom of this street I admired the Baudelaire Cenotaph, a beautiful sculpture of José de Chamoy, more than a century, next to which a man sitting relaxedly drew coal on his sketch notebook.
The quiet was interrupted by the whistle of the cemetery guards. It was six hours and the imminent closure of doors was announced. I left without completing all the intended visits, but I think I finished as I started, with Baudelaire, as if it turned its « fatal hourglass ». I went out at dusk, and outside, two book performances were waiting for me.
I once read a phrase attributed to Heidegger I never forgot. After a conference in 1961, when they asked how we can regain authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), would have answered dryly that we should spend more time in cemeteries. I was never able to determine the truth of this story, which I suspect, but I recognize that if Non è Vera, è Ben Trovata…
