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 and a virtuoso of the literary fragment, Christian Bobin died on Friday at the age of 71. In an interview with "Le Monde des religions" in 2007, he spoke 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 texts, which are novels, journals, and prose poetry, he knew how to extract the marvelous from small things, with simple words, musical phrases, and delicately luminous formulas. A Little Party Dress was his first major success, in 1991. It was followed by a masterpiece, The Very Low , dedicated to Francis of Assisi, which received the Prix des Deux Magots and the Grand Prix Catholique de littérature in 1993. This was also followed, in 2016, by the Prix de l'Académie française, for his entire body of work.

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

Interview originally published in “Le Monde des Religions” No. 25, September-October 2007.
Interview by Frédéric Lenoir and Karine Papillaud.

You are a famous but rare writer, deliberately very discreet in the media. Where does your desire to withdraw come from?

As is often the case in this life, things are mixed up: in what you nicely call my withdrawal, there is a part of character, a sort of modesty, and the fear that speech, by exposing itself too often in broad daylight, loses its vitality. Nothing is more dazzling than traces of sparrow feet in the snow: they allow you to see the whole bird. But for that, you need snow. The equivalent of snow in a human life is a silence, a discretion, that distance which allows for a true connection.

My withdrawal is not misanthropy; it is what gives me a more secure connection to the world. In writing, I feel like a child who, left in his room, begins to speak alone, a little louder than is reasonable, to be heard in the next room where parents or people may be.

This image takes you back to your own childhood. Did the loneliness of the little boy you were ever leave you?

I have a childlike sense of life that persists: I have always been attracted to what is apparently useless, weak, left in the ruts while the great carriage of the world passes by. A child is rarely curious about what preoccupies adults. He will focus his attention on what escapes them or what, of little importance, resembles him.

For example, I can do a whirling dervish dance around a dandelion all afternoon to arrive at the text that suits me, which will grant this dandelion what I saw it to be, that is, a sun descending near us.

Are these states given to you by the contemplation of beauty or by meditation?

I am unable to separate thought from beauty. They have reality as their common root. The small stars that dandelions form in June are much more real and illuminating than all the lamps of our knowledge.

Grace is watching God stand on the tip of a needle, fleeting, tiny

What I am looking for, and what I find difficult to name, is not found in theoretical slumbers, any more than in the irritations of the economy or the mechanical noise of the world. This thing concerns me personally and, I believe, concerns each of us. I try to make small book houses clean enough so that the invisible that seems to me to give meaning to all life enters them, and is welcomed there.

Does this invisible thing have anything to do with the divine? At least give it a name?

Paradoxically, this invisible is made up only of visible things. But freed from our greed, our desires, and our worries. These are the familiar things that we simply let 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 more than anything, Jean Grosjean, and in particular from his book L'Ironie christique , which is a bee-like reading of the Gospel of John: it is a major book of the 20th ^century . The author makes his honey from each word of Christ, he enters into each of them like a bee rushes into each flower of a rosebush, to surprise all the thought.

At the end of the Gospel, it is said that "there are still many other things which Jesus did; if they were written one by one, I believe the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." I took this word literally: I try to be concerned with the present, with who speaks to me or with what is silent before me; I seek in the most shaky part of the present that which will not slide like everything else into darkness. The sky is what lights up in the face-to-face. The bottom line of life, and it is the very bottom line of the Gospels, is that everything that matters always happens between two people.

As a child or adult, did you experience moments of enlightenment, mystical experiences?

It's not really an illumination but a more subterranean, diffuse feeling, which I sometimes thought was lost and which always returned: the sensation of a benevolence woven into the sometimes torn fabric of everyday life. This sensation has never ceased to run beneath the fatigue, the weariness and even the despair. I revolve 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?

Undeniably, the loss of loved ones. We realize that we become deserted 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 enlightens us. And when these presences fade, when the names are erased, there is a strange and painful moment when we become to ourselves like a house emptied of its inhabitants. We are ultimately owners of nothing.

The ordeal of mourning must be endured. It is a test of thought experienced to its fullest. By repressing these things that will inevitably happen, we remove the breeding ground for the deepest thought. We risk devoting 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, uncertain. The unreal is when everything is very easy, there is no more death, and everything is smooth. Unlike technical 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 circulates wonderfully, but there is no one left.

Are we not also in the unreal by being too religious, by living for example in the obvious belief that there is life after death or that God is good?

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

Religions are illiterate in their own scriptures

Religions are cumbersome. They are based on texts that are marvels. But they are first and foremost illiterate in their own writings. They never forget their power. They want to divert the flowing course of life to their own advantage. Basically, we should rid God of God. We could speak of an atheist God of his own religions.

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

It's difficult to answer. Kierkegaard spoke of direct and indirect communication. Simply put, direct communication is when you transmit knowledge: you give it as you give an object. Indirect communication, according to him, is the only one suitable for matters of the mind: nothing should be given directly. Truth is not an object but a bond between two people.

This is why Christ speaks in parables and rarely directly. His words are laden with images, with just the right amount of enigma to make the path clear in the mind of his interlocutor, to enable this interlocutor to accomplish his own mental work. This is the origin of all true poetry: something must be missing in order to hope to taste a little fullness. The problem with what we call knowledge is that everything is done, cooked, and even chewed.

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

Forgive me for being banal, but one is never more aware of life than when one knows that at any second it can waver and crumble to dust. Death is an excellent companion, very fertile for the thought of life. If one is expelled, one condemns the other to exhaust itself in the prison of perpetual distraction.

The clear awareness of life, brought about by the calm reflection of its fragility, is grace itself. Grace is watching God stand on the point of a needle: something fleeting, tiny, not to be held, and coinciding with the incorruptible joy of being alive. Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her letters: "The mere fact of living is an ecstasy to me."

Do you have any hope or deep conviction about death?

I feel that the best of us, when we succeed in keeping it alive, will not be browned, swept away by death. I can hardly say more. Or rather yes: newborns, I have often written, are my mentors. The baby lying flat in his cradle, with the sky, astonished by our eyes, falling upon him, is the very figure of resurrection. It is beautiful, the bare forehead of newborns. It is trust that replaces the skull. Trust is the cradle of life.

Frédéric Lenoir and Karine Papillaud