Christian Bobin: "It's the goodness that amazes me in this life, it's so much more unique than evil."

The World of Religions – 25/11/2022

A writer of fragility, a virtuoso of the literary fragment, Christian Bobin passed away on Friday at the age of 71. In an interview with "Le Monde des religions" given in 2007, he confided in us about his relationship with "the invisible, which seems to give meaning to everything.".

The writer Christian Bobin died this Friday, November 25, at the age of 71. In his works, which range from novels and journals to prose poetry, he knew how to draw out the wonder from small things, with simple words, musical phrases, and delicately luminous turns of phrase. *Une petite robe de fête* (A Little Party Dress) , published in 1991. This was followed by a masterpiece, * Le Très-Bas * (The Very Lowly), dedicated to Francis of Assisi, which received the Prix des Deux Magots and the Grand Prix Catholique de Littérature in 1993. He was also awarded the Prix de l'Académie Française in 2016 for his entire body of work.

But fame and Parisian life always left Christian Bobin unmoved. He continued for a long time to write and live in his own way, without the internet but with a love of silence and flower gardens. And if he agreed to an interview for Le Monde des religions in 2007, it was less, he said, to show off than to grant himself the pleasure of a human encounter and the joy of a freely given sharing.

Interview originally published in "Le Monde des Religions" no. 25, September-October 2007.
Interview conducted by Frédéric Lenoir and Karine Papillaud.

You are a famous but reclusive writer, deliberately very discreet in the media. Where does your desire for withdrawal come from?

As is often the case in this life, things are intertwined: in what you so aptly call my withdrawal, there is an element of character, a kind of modesty, and the fear that words, by being too often exposed in broad daylight, might lose their vitality. Nothing is more dazzling than sparrow tracks in the snow: they allow you to see the bird in its entirety. But for that, you need snow. The equivalent of snow in a human life is silence, discretion, that distance which allows for true connection.

My withdrawal is not misanthropy; it is what gives me a more secure connection to the world. When I write, I feel like a child who, left in his room, starts talking to himself, a little louder than is reasonable, to be heard in the next room where his parents or other people might be.

This image takes you back to your own childhood. Has the loneliness of the little boy you once were ever left you?

I have a childlike sense of life that endures: I have always been drawn to what is seemingly useless, weak, left behind while the grand carriage of the world passes by. A child is rarely curious about what preoccupies adults. They will focus their attention on what escapes them or what, though insignificant, resembles them.

For example, I can spend an entire afternoon whirling around a dandelion to arrive at the text that suits me, which will grant this dandelion's wish and make it what I saw it to be, that is, a sun descended near us.

Are these states brought about by the contemplation of beauty or by meditation?

I am unable to separate thought from beauty. They share a common root in reality. The little stars formed by dandelions in June are far more real and illuminating than all the lamps of our knowledge.

Grace is seeing God standing on the point of a needle, fleeting, infinitesimal

What I'm searching for, and what I struggle to name, isn't found in theoretical slumber, nor in the irritations of economics or the mechanical noise of the world. This thing concerns me personally and, I believe, concerns each of us. I try to create little houses of books, clean enough so that the invisible, which seems to me to give meaning to all life, can enter and be welcomed.

Does this invisible entity have any connection to the divine? At least, do you give it a name?

Paradoxically, this invisible realm is made up entirely of visible things. But these things are freed from our greed, our desires, and our worries. They are the familiar things we simply allow to be and come to us. In this sense, I know of no book more realistic than the Gospels. This book is like bread on the table: the everyday is the foundation of all poetry.

Does their message have a particular resonance in your books?

The deepest light I drew from an author I esteem above all others, Jean Grosjean, and in particular from his book *Christic Irony *, which is a bee's-eye reading of the Gospel of John: it is a major work of the 20th ^century . The author savors every word of Christ, entering each one like a bee plunging into each rosebush blossom, to grasp its full meaning.

At the end of the Gospel, it says that “there are many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I believe even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written about them.” I have taken this saying literally: I try to be attentive to the present, to who is speaking to me or to what remains silent before me; I seek in the most trembling moments of the present that which will not slip away into darkness like everything else. Heaven is what is illuminated in the face-to-face encounter. The essence of life, and this is the very essence of the Gospels, is that everything that matters always happens between two people.

In childhood or adulthood, have you experienced moments of enlightenment, mystical experiences?

It wasn't exactly an epiphany, but a deeper, more diffuse feeling, one I sometimes thought was lost, yet which always returned: the sensation of a benevolence woven into the sometimes torn fabric of daily life. This feeling never ceased to run beneath the weariness, the exhaustion, and even the despair. I keep circling around one word: kindness. It is kindness that astounds me in this life; it is so much more singular than evil.

What have you experienced that has most deeply affected you in your life?

Undoubtedly, the loss of loved ones. We realize we become empty when someone we love dies. That we have no other meaning than to be inhabited by people whose presence delights us or whose very name illuminates us. And when these presences fade, when the names disappear, there is a strange and painful moment when we become to ourselves like a house emptied of its inhabitants. In the end, we own nothing.

The ordeal of grief is something to be endured. It is a trial of thought experienced to its fullest extent. By repressing these things that will inevitably happen, we remove the very foundation of our deepest thoughts. We risk surrendering ourselves to the unreal, which seems to me to be the most dangerous thing in this world.

That's to say ?

The unreal is the loss of human meaning, that is, the loss of what is fragile, slow, and uncertain. The unreal is when everything is very easy, when there is no more death, and everything is smooth. Unlike technological progress, spiritual progress is equivalent to an
increase in difficulties: the more trials there are, the closer you get to a heavenly gate. Whereas the unreal relieves you of everything, including yourself: everything flows wonderfully, but there is no one left.

Don't we also live in the realm of the unreal by being too religious, for example by living with the assumption that there is life after death or that God is good?

We can do to God what children do to a tree, that is, hide behind him. Out of fear of life. The traps in this life are countless, like thinking we're on the right side, that we've seen and counted all the traps, or that we know once and for all what is visible and invisible. It doesn't work like that.

Religions are illiterate in their own scriptures

Religions are cumbersome. They rest on texts that are marvelous. But they are, first and foremost, illiterate in their own scriptures. They never forget their power. They want to divert the flowing current of life to their own advantage. Ultimately, we should rid God of God. We could speak of a God who is atheist to his own religions.

You were talking earlier about "theoretical slumbers." Is knowledge a barrier to a spiritual path?

It's difficult to answer. Kierkegaard spoke of direct and indirect communication. To put it simply, direct communication is when you transmit knowledge: you give it as you would an object. Indirect communication, according to him, is the only kind suitable for matters of the mind: you shouldn't give anything directly. Truth isn't an object but a connection between two people.

This is why Christ speaks in parables and rarely directly. His words are laden with imagery, with just enough enigma to allow the path to unfold in the mind of his listener, so that the listener can undertake their own mental work. This is the origin of all true poetry: something must be missing to hope to experience a taste of fullness. The problem with what we call knowledge is that everything is done, cooked, and even chewed over.

“I was born into a world that was beginning to no longer want to hear about death and that has now achieved its goal, without understanding that it has thereby condemned itself to no longer hear about grace.” This is a sentence from the collection *Pure Presence *, published in 1999. How would you extend this reflection today?

Forgive me for being banal, but we are never more aware of life than when we know that at any moment it can flicker and crumble to dust. Death is an excellent companion, very fertile ground for contemplating life. If we expel the one, we condemn the other to exhaustion in the prison of perpetual distraction.

The clear awareness of life, brought about by the calm contemplation of its fragility, is grace itself. Grace is seeing God poised on the point of a needle: something fleeting, infinitesimal, that above all does not ask to be held onto, and that coincides with the incorruptible joy of being alive. Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her letters: “The simple fact of living is for me an ecstasy.”

Regarding death, do you have a hope, a deep conviction?

I feel that the best in us, when we manage to nurture it, will not be withered, carried off by death. I can hardly say more. Or rather, yes: newborns, as I have often written, are my mentors. The baby lying flat in its cradle, with the astonished sky of our eyes falling upon it, is the very image of resurrection. The bare forehead of newborns is beautiful. It is trust that replaces the skull. Trust is the cradle of life.

Frédéric Lenoir and Karine Papillaud