tristes tropiques

Yesterday, in Grenoble, I visited all the bookshops. First I bought Tristes Tropiques by the great anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss. Then I found a book by psychotherapist Guy Corneau which starts,

“Inevitably there comes a moment in one’s life where nothing’s going right, nothing at all. Sometimes it happens as a result of external circumstances: a divorce, a failure, an illness, a reversal of fortune. Sometimes it happens within, while everything seems to be going fine on the outside…At any rate, whichever way it comes to pass, suddenly the thread seems to break. An irrepressible feeling rises from the depths. It can be a great sadness, an extreme lassitude, a gathering irritation, or the loss of one’s appetite for life. One is confronted, in the words of Leonard Cohen, with an “invincible defeat…”

Corneau is a Jungian, so he believes that such passages of despair and urgency are created by the psyche as an opportunity for discovery, and a chance to break out of the cocoon one has bound oneself into, and become one’s real self.

In the University bookshop I bought an autobiography of Isabelle Jarry, one of my favourite authors. It starts with an account of spending two years working on a new book, only to have her editor reject it.

I’m comforted by the failures of people whose lives and works I admire. It’s so easy to see their temporary blind-alleys as the dust in the oyster. Clearly set within a context of overall success, they look meaningful, or at least harmless. Not a wasteland, but a field left fallow as part of a pattern of crop rotation. Not a drop from a great height into the wilderness, just a wrong turn taken when exploring a new city without a map—no problem, just turn around and find your way again. And keep your eyes peeled as you go, just in case you bump into something amazing and un-thought-of, while you’re walking where you didn’t expect to be.

This is good to remember. Because from ground level, when you're in it, it's too easy to feel like a rat in a labyrinth, with no lever to press. When we're in the shadowy slums of the soul, it’s pure faith to imagine finding one's way out--walking steadily forward into a the light of a wide, tree-lined square, with a fountain sparkling newly in the sun.