Why do we love soap bubbles?

“The soap bubble game is unforgettable. We already find glimpses of it in medieval books, but it is undoubtedly as old as soap itself. And today, despite its antiquated character, all the children of the world continue to delight in its magic without secrets (science has revealed almost all of them: roundness, elastic limits, optical properties, etc.) And, no doubt, at least from time to time all parents. This is what philosopher Pierre Zaoui, the author of a wonderful book, says The beauties of the temporal. Sorry for the soap bubbles (Éditions du Seuil), which helps us think about what makes these bubbles so universal, eternal, and therefore paradoxically eternal.

Unpretentious vanity

“The classical and baroque pictorial tradition placed the soap bubble in the category of vanities in a theological sense. false perishable goods that testify to the emptiness of the creature separated from the Creator and therefore to the imminence of its death. However, among skulls, cut flowers, hourglasses, musical instruments, a soap bubble appears as an anomaly. It’s a vanity that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is, a fleeting beauty.

It is a private good offered to all and belonging to none, an earthly good having the perfect form of celestial and eternal beings; gorgeous and yet almost free beauty made with a little water, air and soap. It’s a little bit of flamboyant grace, swimming all rainbow colors in the sun, but so fragile that it avoids the charge of bad taste in advance.” So what is the happy effect of the balloon on us, on our psyche, on our morality? “Such a bubble reconciles us in advance to vanity in all its senses. Undoubtedly, because it does not overshadow anyone and at least for a moment frees us both from the vain desire to shine and from the cruel desire to last.”

Ease of existence

This reconciliation is obviously not perfect. The philosopher continues his decoding. “Just look at the painting by Jean-Simeon Chardin. A child with a soap bubble, noticed melancholy in the eyes of the young man blowing it, contrasting him with the joy of the one watching him perform this miracle. The eldest knows that nothing lasts, but the youngest knows that everything repeats itself, that repetition can always mend a loss.

What if this was perhaps the greatest magic of bubbles? “They have the power to weld melancholy into joy without mixing them and reducing or distorting one in contact with the other,” the philosopher thinks. “It was as if blowing a bubble opened up the possibility of an awareness of our mortality that would take nothing away from either our joy of living or the lightness of our existence. Who will teach us to experience the fragile anguish of our lives as a grace rather than a curse?

The spirit of childhood

This awareness is perhaps the awareness of childhood that adults keep forgetting and that they must learn again and again if they want to retain a little of this grace during their short existence. “The smallest soap bubble draws a whole map of childhood, at least on its sunny side, because there is also the dark side of childhood, with its leaden weight and its sorrows,” replies Pierre Zaoui. The philosopher evokes “the discovery of desire, always created by a beauty we do not understand, perfect and fleeting, full and empty, poor and gorgeous.”

But also from a distance “the presentation of death, which can sometimes be the very lightness, the comfort of remembering that, deep down, it is so little that it disappears, even in the sacred, when the bubble bursts with the explosion of barbarism and innocence. laughter.” According to this standard, loving soap bubbles in the philosopher’s heart “loves all childhood, both within and without, in any case all childhood can remind us that lightness and transience are still paths, just as serious. as weight and inertia, the sense of gravity.