Muguet rouge

After three years of silence, Christian Bobin published, in autumn 2022, one final volume, Muguet rouge, which opens and closes on two transcriptions of dreams, framing reflections on a world whose dehumanization he could feel. In an interview given at the time of publication, he described the long gestation of this text, which turned out to be his last before his sudden death a month later: “It is good, sometimes, to do once what one never does. My excuse, if one is needed, is that I wanted time — the time to let the world come in through the window, to let a little of the eternal into the house, to witness the combat between the world and the eternal, and to witness the defeat of time. To understand it properly, to hear it properly, one needs time (…). Despite appearances, it is a fragmentary but precise book, stitched through with vision from end to end. My intention was to speak of the world, but not in the usual way. The deck of the Titanic creaks beneath our feet and the scraping of the iceberg still echoes in our ears, only faintly noticed; I wanted to make that scraping of the iceberg audible, to show how we were, and still are, all standing on a deck that is no longer truly horizontal. The internet, smartphones, all these things — I leave them at the door, and I wanted to go and see what lay behind appearances. I tried to see a little further than usual. Pushing my chair back to see better — that is what took me three years […]. This is not an indictment. I am not a bearer of apocalypse. A state of crisis is a natural state of the world. The people killing one another during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, or even the men in the trenches during the First World War, remained — terribly — human. Here, for the first time, we are witnessing the discoloration, the fading, the collapse of the human. […] Today, with a new kind of slave, we have invented things that answer atrociously well to our craving for speed, for velocity, for transparency — you know, that transparency of bathrooms, of autopsy rooms, those white tiles. It is the declared disease of progress. This is a stocktaking. I am not an inquisitor. I am someone who looks, and brings his eyes to the page. After that, one may do with it what one wishes” (in Entretien avec Christian Bobin, 6 October 2022, RTS, Qwertz).