Ne lâchons pas la proie du soleil pour l'ombre des écrans

by Jacques Lacarrière

Qu'aurait pensé La Bruyère du téléphone portable ? Comment Rimbaud, Nerval ou Baudelaire auraient décrit les raffineries qui jalonnent nos autoroutes ? Familier de la Grèce et de l'Orient, Jacques Lacarrière a poursuivi son itinérance dans notre Occident contemporain, en portant un regard singulier sur les innovations qui ont envahi notre quotidien. Avec finesse et humour, il révèle la beauté cachée des lieux ou des objets a priori les moins poétiques - supermarchés, aéroports, smartphones, etc. -, pour peu que l'on change son regard. Ainsi en est-il de ces grues gigantesques emmanchées d'un long cou, qui n'ont rien à envier aux animaux des fables de notre enfance.
Douze textes inédits, formant la seconde partie, et une préface de l'ethnologue Pascal Dibie, prolongent cet inventaire poétique. « L'infini est en nous », conclut Jacques Lacarrière : avec l'aide des mythes et symboles qui peuplent notre imaginaire, nous pouvons aborder allègrement les apparentes incongruités de la modernité.

338 pages, Paperback

Published May 2, 2019

About the author

French writer. He studied moral philosophy, classical literature, and Hindu philosophy and literature. Professionally, he was known as a prominent critic, journalist, and essayist.

A passionate admirer of ancient Greece and its mythology, Lacarrière wrote about it extensively. His essay L'été grec (Greek Summer) was an immense popular success. His classical works Maria of Egypt and Dictionnaire amoureux de la Grèce (Dictionary for one who loves Greece) were also successes.

Of interest to ethnographers and ecologists is his Chemin faisant: Mille kilomètres à pied à travers la France 1974, (On the way: One thousand kilometers by foot across France). It was based on his walking across France in 1971, when he kept to small roads and byways, stopping at villages. Beginning in August, he traveled from Saverne in the Vosges, reaching Leucate in November, which is located in the Corbières. It was reprinted by Fayard in 1997 with a postscript entitled "Memory of roads," and addition of selected letters from readers. It was released again in 2014, again by Fayard.

Lacarrière's 1973 literary essay, Les Gnostiques, is well respected for its insights into the early Christian religious movement of Gnosticism. The writer had met English author Lawrence Durrell in 1971, who had been studying some Gnostic texts since the early 1940s. Durrell featured Gnosticism as a plot element in the novels of his The Avignon Quintet (1974 to 1985). He also wrote a "Foreword" to the 1974 English translation of Lacarrière's essay.

For the whole of his work, in 1991 Lacarrière was awarded le Grand Prix de l'Académie française (the Great Prize of the French Academy).

He died in Paris on 17 September 2005, following complications from orthopedic surgery. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered in Greece, in the waters off the island of Spetses.