The Eighth Day

Dalton Longman Todd has just published Pauline Matarasso's luminous translation of an anthology of Christian Bobin's work. Bobin is a best-selling author in France; his work appeals to a broad range of people from atheists to believers.

The beauty and wisdom of this book is impossible to convey in a standard book review, so, with the publisher's permission, I am posting, this week and next, a few quotations.

From the Introduction, p. 2:

It is only in silence and the mute attention to the immediate that we will find our place in the absolute that surrounds us.

 Silence alone can be depended on. And it is silence that leads once more into the theme of death and back again into childhood: ‘As though the two silences—that of death swaddled in life and that of life winkled from death—had not always been one and the same, the silence of childhood in its boundless grief, in its eternal laughter.’

p. 6  One can be a mine of learning and spend one’s life in total ignorance of life. It is not the books that are to blame, but the meagreness of our desire, the narrow limits of our dreaming. At bottom, if truth is sometimes lacking in us, it’s because we first failed truth, by claiming to direct and know her…

From the text:

p. 15 The leaves on the hazel are trembling in the breeze: there is nothing so pure as the brightness of foliage, diffused in a thousand varicoloured glints. Nothing soothes more than the meekness of these tender leaves, utterly surrendered to the deluge of lights. Their speech is easy on the ear and shot through with silence. [16] Their being is transparent, open to the night as the day; their submission draws on them a sheen of praise. To contemplate these leaves—whose vocation is to worship the source of their torment — purifies thought. As one’s glance take flight, nothing is left except these green, floating leaves, obedient to the whim of timeless currents and sustaining alone the whole weight of infinite space.

p. 17 Where we are—in the eternal moment—there are no words, since everything is present…

…It is the only succour we shall ever have, this beauty that lights our way while casting us into an even deeper night. I write, I do nothing. I love that life, so lacking in events… I am silent, I do nothing, and in an evening’s nothing I slowly learn to name what fills me and eludes me: the wonder of a little green leaf astray in the rising flood of lights.

p.18 The big decisions are taken already in childhood, those that determine the course of the stars and the flow of dreams. They have their source in everything and nothing…

…childhood turns inward for succour. The silence released by sadness finds a mute response in the [19] silence of a decision—like a vow of madness taken under a dark start. The decision has no clear object. Indeed, it has no substance other than silence…The fierce will of a silence in which childhood takes refuge, determined to outlive itself within the parameters of what has just killed it…

p. 19 …the silence of childhood in its boundless grief, in its eternal laughter…

p. 20 Loving and dying proceed from the same knowledge, walk in step together.

p. 23…the painful knowledge that doesn’t come in books: it is in exhaustion that we grow in strength. It is in surrender that princes are made, and in the blaze of dying that the full splendour of loving is revealed. If the beauty of a face is moving, it is thanks to this light that moulds it unaware—a brightness that merges with that of its future disappearance. All I have seen in the nobility of self-forgetful faces has been the traces of this radiance towards which each life is tending without knowing it: beauty and death keep up a ceaseless conversation in the open space of the face, like the subdued chatter of neighbours over the garden fence…

p. 24 What is strange in fact is that grace still gets to us, when we do all we can to render ourselves unreachable. What is strange is that—thanks to a wait, a look, or a laugh—we sometimes gain access to that eighth day of the week, which neither dawns nor dies in the context of time…