You see four people at the edge of the fog, busy looking for something in between the pebbles, or at their feet, but what attracts you first is the color of their clothes, bright red and orange with patches of white in an otherwise brown gray surrounding. It is life versus oblivion, light against shadow, fantasy against uniformity. Then you get the vague memory of a picture hanging somewhere in a museum, a Whistler painting perhaps, or a Turner, a nineteenth-century painter in any case. You remember some characters along a beach, bent on something you cannot discern precisely, surrounded by fog. Like the picture, your memory lacks clarity, and it is not the first time that you have insights of that kind, as if there was a repetition of some patterns lost in between other memories. Anyway, if the story here is the story of four people on a beach looking for something you do not know anything about, and if it is a scene you have already seen, you begin to realize there must be a sense of eternity in it. It also means you have a sense of what eternity is, albeit vague. It is perhaps as simple as brightly clothed forms strolling along the seashore, looking for bits and pieces of nothing, looking for something entirely different from what they will eventually find, drawn by the pleasure of the find more than by the actual find, their acts the embodiment of a life spent strolling on the earth towards something that escapes them, but enjoying the search nevertheless. If Whistler painted this picture a long time ago, assuming it was him, it must also have occurred to him that there was, in it, an idea to be represented. Now that you get the same impression from a different but identical scene, is it not the proof that something hides behind appearances?
Extract from Images, Voyages, Impressions, 2 (sold out as a book but available as an ebook)
Extract from Images, Voyages, Impressions, 2 (sold out as a book but available as an ebook)