In this uninterrupted stream of women, men, children, and dogs that pass by and end up lost from sight among the streets, it would be nice to hold on to a face once in a while. Yes, according to Bowing, amidst the maelstrom that is a large city, you had to find a few fixed points.
...Well, sure, I understood. In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.
...I took the envelope from my pocket and I pored over the pictures for a long while. Where was she now? In a cafe, like me, sitting alone at a table? Doubtless the phrase he had spoken earlier had given me this idea: "It's all about trying to create ties." Encounters in the street, in a Metro station at rush hour. We ought to shackle ourselves to each other at that moment. What connection can resist the tide as it carries you away and diverts your course? An anonymous office where you dictate a letter to a temp typist, a ground-floor apartment in Neuilly whose white, empty walls evoke what some would call a "showroom apartment," where there would be no trace left of your stay. Two photo-booth snapshots, one facing the camera, one in profile. And that's what we're supposed to forge links with?
--
Patrick Modiano, In the Cafe of Lost Youth (
2007, trans. Chris Clarke).
