La place

It’s a while since I left this blog ….
Reading “La place” prompts me to take it back (Édouard Louis, En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, Seuil, 2014).

Here’s how things went:
- in the morning I see youtube having coffee since I don’t have a television;
- I drink coffee and news at the same time.
- then people’s voices make the morning more populated and you can interrupt it at will.
- I saw a nice video of ARTE (french channel) “Peut-on vraiment quitter sa social class? | Les idées Larges | ARTE” with Avec également Chantal Jaquet, sociologist.

Everything Chantal Jaquet says is beautiful, to be listened to again.
Among other things, she refers to this book that I did not know.
I like to read little stories of popular French life, to find it more similar than I thought to rural southern Italy.

Annie Ernaux’s place speaks a little about me, too.
I found myself in the figure of the worker's father.
I found myself in the discomfort of “making a good impression” of an imaginary otherness with the bourgeoisie or the intellectuals of the country.
I found myself in the tiredness of being accepted and the important efforts only for oneself, to feel up to it and to know if one can access the social “place” so imagined and little lived.
I found myself not feeling adequate to enter a restaurant or chic place, knowing that I don’t belong (do I know the codes of the context?).
Then the years also cover the emotions and sensations, the apprehensive accessibility of everything for everyone.
Feeling disconnected from contexts and knowing that there was something beautiful, true, understandable there, in the gestures of all workers.

The text is short and reads quickly.

The reading of this text allowed me to situate myself, to find positions.

I feel a generation behind my contemporaries in France: I had more in common with my partner’s grandmother than with her mother’s generation.

Acting, forgetting, reconstructing lived choices and emotions.