From “present moment” to “feeling of the past”. how to live with time

In the busy era of living at full speed, time seems to have become a cardinal value. But what time are we talking about? The one in Ferre’s song that gnaws, takes away everything. The sudden, the instant, the second, the one promoted by social networks. The Proustians rediscovered the time of memory, that sedimentation of memories.

In some civilizations, the directions of the time vector are reversed; instead of pointing the finger backward to point to the past and forward to point to the future, one considers that the future, because it is uncertain, is still behind. on the contrary, before our eyes there is the already lived and known past. What do writers do with time? Do they share with Ferre this pessimistic perception of duration that erases everything, of this time that comes and then goes? Agnes Desart in her latest work The Château des Rentiers, is part of this possible reversal of the representation of time, the stuff of awe.

He sees “the past as good”, hence this optimistic view, which he describes as almost “childish”. This literary work on memories is for him a pure aesthetic experience, far from any utilitarian or therapeutic research; For me, writing is purely an artistic experience, the taste of the unknown, the almost instinctive curiosity of living an experience.

It is my mastery of time that has allowed me to live normally. This search for balance has become a raison d’être

Agnes Desart

The meaning of the past

“The past has always been present,” continues Agnes Desart. There are things that go away, but where they go, we can see them through the photo, a piece of cake. Memories are somewhere else, accessible to the mind. They continue to belong to us. Jerome Garsen is a journalist and writer. Two activities which, according to him, correspond to two conceptions of time. “I’m a good example of temporary schizophrenia,” he confides. For forty years I have lived my profession as a journalist, which has made the Internet more instantaneous, and as a novelist I go in the opposite times.

For him, literature was a savings, while from the age of 18-30 he lived only in the present time; twin, loss of father when we are teenagers… If I didn’t write OlivierI would not have understood our twin relationship so much. to work hard meant to work for both; to love a horse was to love a stable animal on all fours. And then literature makes the present absent. Seeing my brother Olivier’s name written on the cover brings to life the missing 6-year-old that no one but me could remember. It is my mastery of time that has allowed me to live normally. This search for balance has become a raison d’être.’

Present

Nowadays, our relationship with the past is undermined by an overvaluation of immediacy, especially through social media. “We even coined an acronym: Fomo (Fear of missing out editor’s note), laments Agnes Desart. Viewing the present as fascinating, we are haunted by the fear of missing out. I grew up with the feeling that nothing was happening, and I developed my focus on this nothingness. According to the writer, our contemporaries have lost the curiosity to look back, and ultraliberalism preserves this amnesia. “Thinking about the past, there is nothing to sell,” he says.

The author points to another evil of the century, which suppresses the memory of things and which he calls the crisis of narrative: distrust of what we say. However, he claims. “The past passes through the narrative.” He opposes the image of a “coil” to the linear conception of time. At a certain point, we get closer to the center, we experience things that match the older state.” A search for balance, time that wraps around itself. like writers, all are exploring ways to avoid suffering in the abnormal times of our current lives.

The Château des Rentiers, By Agnes Desart, Éditions de l’Olivier. Olivier, By Jerome Garcin, Folio Collection.