Catégorie : C’est la vie

Fréquentations d’un secret

Lire: En ce sens, aimer et écrire sont donc deux fréquentations d’un secret qu’il faut accepter de ne jamais percer?

Eric-Emmanuel-Schmitt: Oui, la similitude est grande. Au départ, il y a un impérialisme dans l’écriture, c’est-à-dire une volonté de s’approcher du secret, de le révéler et de le résoudre. Puis vient la période de l’humilité, c’est-à-dire le moment où l’on comprend que ce secret est précisément ce qui nous rend fécond, qu’on ne parviendra jamais à le posséder et qu’on ne doit pas y parvenir. L’amour est semblable: accepter de ne pas posséder le secret de l’autre, se rendre compte que c’est précisément parce qu’on ne cherche pas à le percer que l’amour se fortifie. La littérature vise à rendre du mystère, pas à en percer. L’amour aussi, je crois.

Tiré d’un entretien entre Lire et Eric-Emmanuel-Schmitt.

He sums it up pretty well

Macleans:
This is a paradox, isn’t it, making meaningful films about the meaninglessness of existence?

Woody Allen:
I have no real answers or knowledge of these things, I only have my feelings about them, and I’m ready to explore all the possibilities. My own personal conclusion concurs with what seems to be the everyday finding of our physicists, that it was an accident, that it will end, and it was just an odd little phenomenon that has no meaning, that [it] wasn’t created by any super-being or with any design, it’s just a chance phenomenon and a micro-speck in an overwhelming, violent universe, and it will end, and everything that Shakespeare did and Beethoven did, all of that will be gone, and every planet will be gone, every star will be gone–down the line–but that’s where we’re headed, out of nothing to nothing.

And yet the trick, to me, seems to be to find, not meaning, but to be able to live with that and to enjoy life. By enjoy it I don’t mean sybaritically, I mean to be able to find some kind of MO where you can enjoy your life, even if it’s abstemious and you spend your life in a monastery and you enjoy culturing flowers and pea pods every morning or something, but if that will get you through it in some decent way, that’s the best you can hope for.

To live with the awful truth, we’re endowed with this denial mechanism. Some people have less of a denial mechanism than others, but without it, if you faced the real truth all the time, it’s very, very unpleasant.

From a Macleans interview with Woody Allen (volume 121, number 1, January 14, 2008)