“We civilizations now know that we are mortal…” wrote Paul Valéry in 1919. No one could be better convinced of this than a former head of archeology at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Vincent Jacq therefore chose to bring together in an admirable literary herbarium some impressions of his travels across the planet (“Without the impatience of those far away, it is difficult to imagine a happy sedentary person”).
If everything were to one day disappear, a book would keep track of the beauty of the world we have inhabited. This book is titled Atlantis. Of Morocco from his childhood to Mexicofrom Bali to Ambleville (Val-d’Oise), from the Holy Land toAsia central, of theItaly darling Japanthe author repeats the same tour de force. Extract from a moment the juice of eternity, translate into a prose poem the secret language yet common to all men, “as if life took its source in a few simple and rare moments, as if our senses were truly born in those moments and then we wandered in pursuit of a time where pure sensation and pleasure would once again reign”.
The writer extracts from a moment the juice of eternity
Watcher for epiphanies – we find ourselves reading aloud a certain page on theUzbekistan or Dire Dawa, in Ethiopia – Vincent Jacq also acts as a seer, a liaison agent between appearances and a spiritual dimension, between the present and the immemorial: “The Gnostics, Christian heirs of Orphism, saw in man a brilliance fallen from a higher world and which aspires to return there. This nostalgia is a kind of exile for the soul which feels deprived of something higher than itself, of which it does not have a precise memory but which obsesses it. The beauty that emerges from beings, from nature and from things, would only be the broken mirror, the shards of this distant world deposited in ours. » As a quick glance at the booksellers’ tables would be enough to confirm, the intimate rages, parents are in the spotlight, fashion imposes itself If I had a hammer (“I would call my father, my mother, my brothers and my sisters, oh oh, that would be happiness”). Atlantis expands the family to the dimensions of all humanity – nothing more beautiful to read at the moment.
AtlantisVincent Jacq, L’Escampette, 176 pages, 19 euros.
