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Mathis Chau17/01/2026
Carnet
Between Grace and Works
Have you ever been touched by grace? Beauty striking you, passing through your senses to tingle your brain.
But if you ever had a glimpse of beauty, did you ever feel the call of works as well? Blood rushing through your veins, adrenaline keeping you awake, the urge to build and leave a part of you in the world.
i
The old words
Grace and works, contemplation and action.
This is the duality I’ve been through for years. Two parts of my person I’ve tried to explore and explain. Should one fuel the other ? Should one take over the other ? Can the two co-exist ?
Over a duality, it used to be a tension.
One is about slowness. The other about speed.
One is immaterial. The other purely material.
One is about writing slowly, letting the world infuse through your mind and feelings that themselves dictate your hand which guides tip of your pen on an ivory notebook. The other is about typing frenetically on a mechanical keyboard, filling a CRM database in a notion workspace.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958I finally found words for it in Thomas d’Aquin (Summa Theologica) and Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition). They handed me the old terms: vita contemplativa and vita activa.
Vita contemplativa is the contemplative life: thoughts, prayer, philosophy, withdrawal from practical urgency.
Vita activa is the active life: work, actions, politics, transforming the world.
Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, XThose terms take their root in Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle. For whom contemplation was above action since contemplation touches what’s eternal while action is temporary. This hierarchy lived through eras: Thomas d’Aquin still acknowledges contemplation over action: action has to be rooted in contemplation or it becomes ego or noise. But we start seeing a switch during Renaissance, where we see a hybrid ideal: the cultivated mind that acts. Contemplation as a preparation for action. Finally, the tables turn in the modern era. Action becomes superior. Action used to serve truth, now truth serves action.
ii
The war
I was born in this action-first world. Work on yourself so you can produce more. And surprisingly, it’s probably through action that I was introduced to contemplation. Self-growth books led me to philosophy, philosophy led me to literature. The search for answers and solutions helped me find questions and problems.
Hermann Hesse’s books walked me through this tension and I grew by reading them multiple times, at different times of my life, with a different understanding. The duality displayed in the books: Steppenwolf: the wolf and the bourgeois, Narcisse and Goldmund: the thinker and the artist, Demian: light and dark. Probably shaped my young brain that read them very simply. Maybe I was a duality myself ? When humans can’t grasp the complexity of the world, they try to simplify it. So I did.
On one side, I put the thinker: Slow life, philosophy, poetry, aimless walks and cigarettes
On the other side, the merchant: Fast life, business, self-growth, discipline and e-cigs.
The two were leading a war. How could the thinker waste time thinking about life, reading books and taking time finding its meaning while he should be building a business, growing his network and fixing his sleep schedule ? How could the merchant sacrifice humanity for fixed habits, time-blocked calendars and SaaS ?
So I lived through cycles. The thinker bloomed when the body was exhausted and the mind needed alignement. The merchant was productive when the body was replenished and the mind aligned thanks to the thinker’s work and he pushes it until the body can’t follow anymore and the mind doesn’t remember why he’s doing all this. I lived three years that way. Three years thinking the conflict would never stop, that excellence meant sacrifice and that I needed to kill one of my sides to let the other live.
Hesse, Der Steppenwolf, 1927That’s when I re-read Steppenwolf and understood I was wrong from the beginning. Harry’s tragedy was to try reducing himself to his duality. The goal was never to kill the wolf or the man, it was to embrace inner multiplicity.
You can work hard and live softly, discipline yourself and keep your chaos, celebrate the beauty of life and celebrate a deal.
Those are not contradictions, they are your whole. Stop making one fight the other, let them dance together.
There are two ways to be rare: to go deeper than anyone into a single life, or to hold together lives that were never meant to meet.
iii
Notes from the battlefield
Problem: while expertise is widely documented, how the hell am I supposed to hold together multiple lives at once ?
So I did what the merchant does with undocumented problems: learn, build, measure and run experiments, and what the thinker does with any life: I kept the journal.
Eight years of dated entries, one summer of life scoring spreadsheets, a mathematical model of my energy cycles, a personal AI coach.
Here are a few things I learnt along the way:
- The body is the shared infrastructure: Merchant or thinker, they both share the same body. The body dictates who show up. If I master the body, I choose who show up and when.
- Separate their hours, not their importance: The merchant lives the day when the coffee’s hot and the phone’s ringing, the thinker mostly the night when the lights are dim and the streets are quiet.
- Give each one his own tools: The merchant gets the notion and the databases, the thinker gets Apple notes and the paper notebook. I tried forcing one into the other’s tool, it never worked for me.
- Let the thinker live when happiness is at its peak: The happier I was, the less I was asking myself questions, that’s when I let work take over, and push reflection aside as there are no problems to treat. That’s precisely when I need to schedule the thinker.
- Learn the signals of death from both: Each side dies differently. Too much building and work turns to noise: I lose the why. Too much contemplating and the days go hollow: I lose the drive. The fix is always to pay the other man: when it’s noise, take a walk and think. When it’s hollow, build something small to get back on track.
- Find bridges between them: Build around your soul with an engineering approach, an essay like this one.
I opened this short piece of writing with two questions: « Have you ever been touched by grace ? » and « Have you ever felt the call of works ? »
It took me years to hear them as one question: What makes you live ?
This text is part of my answer.
Aquinas, Summa, q. 188contemplata aliis tradere
— M.C
Graphic novel
9 secondes : La civilisation du poisson rouge (BD)
An adaptation of The Goldfish Civilisation, the bestseller by Bruno Patino, president of Arte, by Morgan Navarro, the author of Ma vie de réac.
The goldfish swims round its bowl. It seems to rediscover the world with every lap. Google's engineers managed to calculate the maximum length of its attention: 8 seconds. The same engineers measured the attention span of the millennial generation, the one that grew up with connected screens: 9 seconds. We have become goldfish, shut in the bowl of our screens, subject to the merry-go-round of our alerts and instant messages.
A study in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology puts at 30 minutes the maximum time of exposure to social networks and internet screens beyond which a threat to mental health appears.
Bruno Patino: “According to this study, my case is hopeless, so much is my daily practice one of dependence on the signals that crowd my phone's screen. We are all on the road to addiction: children, young people, adults. For those who believed in the digital utopia, and I am one of them, the time of regret has come. Take Tim Berners-Lee, ‘the inventor’ of the Web, who is now trying to create a counter-Internet to annihilate his first creation. The utopia, though, was a beautiful one, gathering in one and the same communion followers of Teilhard de Chardin and Californian libertarians on acid.
Digital servitude is the model the new empires have built, without having foreseen it, but with relentless determination. At the heart of the reactor, no technological determinism, but a project that expresses the mutation of a new capitalism: the attention economy.”
Magazine
See All This #32
Home is where life is held. It is the womb, the room, the world where we make our mark. A space that we have breathed life into and where that same life lingers even after we have left. For this winter issue, See All This explores the definition of home, should such a thing exist, with the help of artists, writers, travellers and architects, who understand the value of a place to call one’s own. Experience belonging in its every facet, guided by the ultimate homemaker, architect and artist Bijoy Jain, founder of Studio Mumbai.
(Winter 2023-2024 issue, “Make yourself a home”, curated by Bijoy Jain)
Essay
Éloge de l'ombre
In this essay on Japanese aesthetics, published in 1933, the writer defends an aesthetic of half-light as a reaction against the Western aesthetic in which everything is lit. He champions the patina of objects against the smoothness of the West.
Non-fiction
Cultures du design numérique: Histoire des idées et enjeux contemporains
From the second half of the twentieth century onwards, a new field of action for design gradually took shape: digital design.
While borrowing from different design disciplines, it has its own specific features, tied to the interactive and programmed nature of what it produces.
At a time when designing digital artefacts can sometimes seem to boil down to dragging and arranging standardised interface components, this book offers an archaeology of the theories that have helped give interfaces the form we know today.
Each chapter is built around a major question meant to bring to light the theoretical debates that have stirred, and still stir, digital design. History of ideas and contemporary issues are thus put into dialogue, so that practitioners and students can step back from the automatisms and injunctions that shape their practices. Because behind interfaces and the words used to describe them, the choices made embed political visions and technological imaginaries: far from being trivial, these deeply shape our relationship to the digital and, through it, our way of being in the world.
Nolwenn Maudet is a senior lecturer in design at the University of Strasbourg. Trained first as an interaction designer and then as a researcher in design and human-computer interaction, she continues her research into the many relationships between design and the digital. She seeks to understand how computing has transformed design practices, and also how designers in turn shape digital artefacts.
She is a member of the "Visual Cultures" research programme at the ACCRA laboratory, and co-founded the "Digital Limits" research project, which specifically studies the environmental impacts of current design practices in the digital field. At the University of Strasbourg, she co-directs a master's programme dedicated to digital design.
Literature
Les Piliers de la mer
From the Aiguille d'Étretat to Totem Pole in Tasmania, by way of the Faroe Islands and Cape Horn, Sylvain Tesson has climbed more than a hundred stacks, these rocky pillars rising off the coast, over twenty years. He tells the story of his round-the-world journey in search of these last stretches of land untouched by man, which, wild, free and solitary, are the perfect embodiment of his relationship to the world.
Novel
Une sacrée envie de foutre le bordel
There are not many entrepreneurs in France who have made a fortune starting from nothing. A child from Créteil with no education, who did time in prison and became a billionaire: you can search, there is no other. This is neither an autobiography nor an interview. It is a conversation between friends that tells the story of a man, his choices, his regrets, his hopes. It is the story of a success and of the improbable path that led to it.
Philosophy
De l'âme
‘When I received your first letter, dear friend, I replied to you at once. Hearing from you after more than thirty years moved me so much that my reaction could only be an instant cry. Your second letter, which lies before me now, I kept with me for a long time; it is only today that I am attempting to give you an answer. You have no doubt guessed the reason for this delay, since your letter contains a singular request: “Tell me about the soul”… Your sentence, “Late in life, I discover a soul in myself”, I believe I have said it myself, many times over. But I had always immediately stifled it within me, for fear of appearing ridiculous. At most, in a few of my texts and poems, I had dared to use this old-fashioned word, which is surely what gave you leave to call on me. Under your injunction, I understand that the time has come for me to take up the challenge…’
Literature
La force des choses, tome 1
Left to settle too long, the past loses the intensity that once made us live it with a pounding heart, the intensity that gives memories their human savour, lacking the cold impartiality of history. That is why, at the risk of being reproached for lacking the necessary distance, Simone de Beauvoir chose, in Force of Circumstance, to continue the autobiography begun in Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée and La Force de l'âge. Public life and private life blend together over the years that follow the great surge of hope raised in 1944 by the liberation of Paris, for Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir opted for the political engagement they considered the only conduct compatible with their philosophical ideas: that existentialism which the world was in the process of discovering. Action was therefore necessary, and opportunities were not lacking. It seemed that after the Allied victory a fairer society could be rebuilt, but there were post-war scores to settle, positions to fight over, ideologies at odds, the whole political muddle leading to the Indochina affair, the Algerian war or the birth of the Fifth Republic, and, outside France, the crushing of Hungary or the Cuban revolution, to name only a few examples. Interwoven with political action are the writer's travels and work: nearly twenty years of a recent past fully lived by a woman who knew how to keep the promises of her youth.
Philosophy
Un sens à la vie : Enquête philosophique sur l'essentiel
Meaning is everywhere, but its definition is nowhere. We want meaning in our work, in our relationships, in the face of the system. But what are we looking for when we look for meaning? What lies behind this eternal Grail, become so important that it seems to have supplanted the pursuit of happiness? To answer this, this inquiry shows how meaning circulates between what we feel, what we understand and what we desire. But a major shift has broken the balance between these three poles, for as soon as we look at a screen, we plug ourselves into the digital “super-consciousness” that upsets our relationship to meaning. Hence what must be called the contemporary “digitoses”: burnout, eco-anxiety, rivalry with artificial intelligence and the triumph of the machinoids, those humans who come to resemble their tools.
Novel
Je dirai malgré tout que cette vie fut belle
To defend himself in a trial he brings against himself, the author gallops through a vanished past. He moves from the golden age of a classicism that reigned over Europe to the collapse of that “world of yesterday” so dear to Stefan Zweig. From Colbert, Fouquet, Bossuet or Racine to François Mitterrand, Raymond Aron, Paul Morand and Aragon.
But the charms of a life and the whirlwinds of history are not enough for the accused:
“You surely did not imagine that I was going to content myself with reeling off memories of childhood and youth for you? I do not rate myself very highly, but I have not sunk low enough to hand you what are called Memoirs.”
The adventures of a writer who loved happiness and pleasure in spite of so many misfortunes gradually give way to a graver look at the drama that never stops playing out between time and eternity, and that will carry us all away.
Literature
La Chute
In 1953, in the full turmoil of the Cold War and the criticism that followed the publication of L'Homme révolté, the essay that appeared in 1951 and completes the cycle of revolt, Camus goes through a new drama: his wife Francine attempts suicide while in hospital. How? She lets herself be thrown from the window… But what does this fall symbolise? And how does it irremediably bind Camus to his destiny? This fall is what will drive the writer to keep writing, so that the world never comes undone, caught once again within absurd partitions, unable to understand tomorrow and refusing yesterday. But this time the absurd is different: it has a taste of anger, of guilt. That of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, another malevolent double of the author, who, through monologue and Dostoevskian polyphonic conclave, builds up a story, his own, which we understand later through the truth and the grace it engenders, a story that is also that of humanity. If Camus here produces one of his finest texts, moving and profound, describing a man's weakness before a woman's beauty in a Baudelairean manner, or simply the contemplation of people walking in the street as seen from this window in Amsterdam, he also demonstrates, within the space of 150 pages, new literary motivations that are anything but incidental to the Stockholm academy's choice to name the writer Nobel Prize winner in literature, in November 1957.
Marius Lambert
Book description: 1956. PARIS, Gallimard – (1956/1972) – Folio collection
“On the bridge, I passed behind a shape leaning over the parapet, and which seemed to be looking at the river. From closer up, I made out a slim young woman, dressed in black. Between her dark hair and the collar of her coat, one could see only the nape of her neck, fresh and damp, to which I was not indifferent. But I continued on my way, after a moment's hesitation. I had already gone about fifty metres when I heard the sound, which despite the distance seemed tremendous to me in the nocturnal silence, of a body striking the water. I stopped short, but without turning round. Almost at once, I heard a cry, repeated several times, which likewise went down the river, then suddenly died away.”
By the same author
Novel
L'Art de l'oisiveté
Written between 1899 and 1962, the 37 texts in this volume, most of them previously unpublished in French, speak of music, painting, books, landscapes, and encounters with people. Hesse proposes a new relationship to existence, a kind of programme he calls “the art of idleness”: an art of looking that champions humour, scepticism, critical spirit, in short, the freedom of the individual.
By the same author
Novel
Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a novel in the form of variations. Its different parts follow one another like the different stages of a journey that leads inside a theme, inside a thought, inside one single situation whose full understanding is lost in immensity.
It is a novel about Tamina and, the moment Tamina leaves the stage, it is a novel for Tamina. She is the main character and the main listener, and all the other stories are a variation on her own first story and come together in her life as in a mirror.
It is a novel about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about angels.
By the same author
Novel
La mort heureuse
“I am certain that one cannot be happy without money. That is all. I like neither ease nor romanticism. I like to see things clearly. Well, I have noticed that among certain elite beings there is a kind of spiritual snobbery in believing that money is not necessary for happiness. It is foolish, it is false, and to a certain extent, it is cowardly.”
In 1938, Albert Camus abandoned his first novel, A Happy Death, to begin writing The Stranger. This first novelistic project, published posthumously, is nonetheless rich in luminous descriptions of nature and nonconformist reflections. The hero, Meursault, desperately seeks happiness, even at the cost of a crime. His journey is fed by Camus's difficult and ardent youth; his choices and his thoughts foreshadow the stories and essays to come.
By the same author
Literature
Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'une femme
At the casino in Monte Carlo, an English widow takes under her wing a young man ruined by the fever of gambling. Taking on the role of both mother and lover, she tries everything to help him. She no longer recognises herself: will she abandon her bourgeois life and run away with him? Saving him means losing herself. Here is the account of the twenty-four hours that change a life. In this dark novella, published in 1925, which struck Freud deeply, Zweig shows himself at the height of his art as a psychologist, in his analysis of love at first sight and of gambling addiction, as well as of a more complex passion that threatens the heroine: dangerous pity, that mixture of sensuality and duty. The author admirably describes the inner conflict at play in every individual when their existence turns into destiny.
Novel
Pour une nuit d'amour - L'inondation
Every day, Julien plays the flute for the beautiful Thérèse de Marsanne, whom he glimpses from his window. But the young woman does not look at him and ignores him despite his daily serenades… until the evening she invites him to join her in her room. Julien rushes over, but is he truly ready to do anything for a night of love?
Two short, dramatic novellas that reveal a new facet of the author of the Rougon-Macquart cycle.
Literature
Le Jeu des perles de verre
“What would happen if, one day, science, the sense of beauty and the sense of goodness were to merge into a harmonious concert? What would happen if this synthesis became a marvellous working instrument, a new algebra, a spiritual chemistry that would allow one to combine, for example, astronomical laws with a phrase of Bach and a verse of the Bible, in order to derive new notions that would in turn serve as a springboard for other operations of the mind?”
This extraordinary mathematics is that of the glass bead game, perfectly mastered by Joseph Knecht, a fascinating hero and ludi magister who juggles with every element of human culture. A tale of anticipation, a novel of intellectual and religious education, a pessimistic utopia, The Glass Bead Game is one of Hermann Hesse's broadest and most erudite literary constructions.
By the same author
Novel
Knulp
Germany, at the turn of the century. Knulp, an ageing vagrant just out of hospital, returns to the village of his childhood: he is ill, weakened, worn out by his years of wandering. Homeless, he goes from house to house, settling in with one person or another as the fancy takes him. But the welcome he receives is falsely warm. Suspicion and resentment are in people's minds. His old companions reproach him for having wasted the gifts he possessed and for having given himself over to the emptiness of a bohemian life… With Knulp, Hermann Hesse painted one of his finest literary portraits: that of a free being who, to guide his existence, chose dreams over social conventions. A complex and endearing character, Knulp forms a fascinating figure of a gifted dilettante whose most secret thoughts the reader gradually comes to penetrate… A magical novel, an apologia for freedom, nonchalance and disinterestedness, Knulp is also a superb meditation on secret wounds, solitude and failure.
By the same author
Novel
La Métamorphose
This is one of the reasons why the author Franz Kafka is recognised today. With each new printing, The Metamorphosis proves to be a bombshell, a pure product of the very best literature can do in relation to existential crisis. At first we believe in the story of an insect, then that of a man, and finally our own. For Gregor Samsa is never really far from making us think of a double of ourselves. He is the artist rejected by society, by his family, but he is also the adolescent in the throes of puberty, the young man who is lost. Kafka brings into relation a petty, tormenting society, fascinated by social hierarchy and by money, just as he magnifies tenfold the profound unease that creeps into his character but that speaks of everyone. A short, intense book, as the first films of David Lynch would be a century later, The Metamorphosis stands today as the anthology masterpiece of the twentieth century.
Novel
Le garçon sauvage : Carnet de montagne
The author reconnects with the mountains, with himself... and brings back to mind the finest literary writing on nature.
The Wild Boy opens on a particular winter: Paolo Cognetti, 30 years old, is suffocating in his life in Milan and can no longer manage to write. To catch his breath, he goes to spend a summer in the Aosta Valley. There, he roams the peaks, suspended between childhood and adulthood, reconnecting with freedom and inspiration. He plunges into the heart of the wild life that still populates the mountain, discovers the isolation of the summits, before beginning his descent, reconciled with existence. Nevertheless, this initiatory stay does not manage to free him entirely from the human race: “I could free myself of everything, except solitude.”
Literature
Novecento : Pianiste
Born during a crossing, Novecento, at thirty years old, has never once set foot on dry land. Sailing ceaselessly across the Atlantic, he spends his life with his hands resting on the eighty-eight black and white keys of a piano, composing a strange and magnificent music that belongs to him alone: the music of the Ocean, whose echo spreads through every port.
In the form of a poetic monologue, Baricco combines the enchantment of fable with dizzying metaphors.
By the same author
Literature
Lettres à un jeune poète
An officer cadet in the Austro-Hungarian army, an aspiring writer, sends his poetic attempts to Rainer Maria Rilke and asks for his opinion. From 1903 to 1908, in some ten letters, the young man, then at a crossroads, hesitating between the ready-made path of a military career and the adventurous solitude of a writer's life, confides to his admired elder his doubts, his sufferings, his romantic stirrings, his questions about love and sexuality, his difficulty in creating and in existing.
The poet answers him. A correspondence begins. Refusing from the outset the role of critic, Rilke will say nothing about his verses, but will set out what writing, living as a poet, and simply living, mean to him. Published for the first time in its entirety, this intimate exchange not only finally allows us to discover the other side of letters that were the breviary of entire generations, it also gives Rilke's text a new power and reach, and invites us to rethink both the radical nature of his aesthetic commitment and the striking modernity of his vision of women.
Edition prepared by Erich Unglaub.
Novel
L'Homme qui voulait changer le monde
The seven stories gathered in this volume illustrate, with great diversity of tone and style, the lasting modernity of Hermann Hesse.
From the short text “The Wolf”, written in 1903 and so emblematic of the future author of Steppenwolf, to “The Beggar” of 1948, Hesse constantly deepens his art and his thought. Kafkaesque in “If the War Goes on for Another Two Years” (1917), a forerunner of postmodernist irony in “A Tourist Town in the South of France” (1925), he is, above all, in “The Brothers of the Sun” (1904), “The Man Who Wanted to Change the World” (1910) and “Robert Aghion” (1912), the chronicler of the marginal being, the misfit, the perpetual outsider who cannot fit into the too narrow mould society offers him, and who carries within him a generous, if not spiritual, vision.
By the same author
Literature
Mon maître et mon vainqueur
“The notebook was the first thing the judge had shown me, when I had come into his office a little earlier. Under the soft, transparent cover, one could read, in black felt-tip: MY MASTER AND MY CONQUEROR.
On the following pages, there were poems. This was what had been found on Vasco: the revolver, a notebook filled with some twenty poems, and, later, after ballistic examination, powder residue on his hands.
This, I thought, was all that remained of his love story.”
Novel
Un certain sourire
In the company of her young lover Bertrand, Dominique, a student at the Sorbonne, knows well “the little mauve colour of boredom”. Everything changes when Bertrand introduces her to his uncle Luc, a seductive man in his forties with a light reputation. Near him, Dominique suddenly feels cheerful and funny, strangely alive, and agrees to go with him for a fortnight's holiday in Cannes.
What does she risk? Growing attached to this frivolous, slightly cynical man, who seems to be playing with her? Suffering afterwards? And then? Are pleasure, laughter, an unexpected complicity not worth more than boredom? Every danger lies in wait for Dominique on the shores of the Mediterranean. She does not yet know how one recovers from a love…
By the same author
Novel
Gioconda
Here is the luminous account of an initiation into love, vibrant with naturalness and sensuality despite hatred and death. Nìkos, a teenage boy, and Gioconda, a young Jewish girl, love each other with an absolute love until she is deported to Auschwitz in 1943. “This is the book I love best in the world. It is a magnificent story, at once poetic and deeply sensual…”
Back cover:
“The most beautiful homage to life one could imagine.” Antoine Pamiers, Télérama
“In the Greece of the Second World War, two teenagers discover the magic of desire and love. The turmoil of war will sweep this love away, but this book restores it to us with extraordinary strength and truth, and we carry its light in our hearts for a long time.” Marie-Jo Sotto-Battesti, Librairie Goulard
“The book I love best in the world.” Dominique A.
“Gioconda is the little book you never forget, the book you will delight in giving, in passing on like a secret, like a treasure.” Nicolas Lefort, Librairie Audé
“We are at the very centre of love. We love watching them love each other, we fall in love with their love. A great, great, great book. One remembers it all one's life.” Hippolyte Girardot, France Inter
Nìkos Kokàntzis, born in Thessaloniki in 1930, discovered love with Gioconda in 1943. She was Jewish, and was deported to Auschwitz… and never returned. In 1975, Kokàntzis decided to tell their love story, so that Gioconda might live again through his words. He died in 2009.
Novel
Aimez-vous Brahms...
date: 1963
Forty years old. The age of fulfilment? Françoise Sagan wonders, through the character of Paule. Paule is an interior decorator, divorced, and lives alone. She is attractive, and yet her face has lost its freshness. There is something resigned about it. She has loved Roger for six years and patiently endures his infidelities. She is his anchor, she knows it. But waiting and solitude weigh on her a little more each day. She meets a young man, Simon, the son of a client, who falls passionately in love with her.
The author evokes this triangular relationship from the point of view of each character. But at bottom, it is above all about Paule, her doubts, her renunciations, her desires. Françoise Sagan tenderly observes the reactions of this woman who lets herself be loved to distraction, as if it were the last time.
The psychological analysis is subtle. But the tone is resolutely light. Reading this novel invites a smile; a sense of derision constantly underlies the writing and offers a kindly look at existence.
By the same author
Non-fiction
Lettre à Ménécée
Letter to Menoeceus
“To say that it is too early or too late for philosophy is to say that the hour for being happy has not yet come, or has already passed.” Happiness is the end of human existence. Who will deny it? But it is harder to work out clearly the means of attaining it.
This unforgettable text must be read to discover that thought and friendship are the only true havens of the wise. To be happy, let us reconnect with Epicurus.
The study guide
- The architecture of the work
- The author and his context
- Themes and issues of the work
- Glossary
Novel
Le mythe de Sisyphe
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem: suicide.” With this thunderous formula, which seems to strike out the whole of philosophy in a single stroke, a young man of under thirty begins his analysis of the absurd sensibility. He describes the “sickness of the mind” from which the present age suffers: “The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
By the same author
Literature
Le Gai savoir
Is an alliance possible between lucidity and joy? What strength is needed to love reality as it is, to embrace the contradictions of life? A rare power, the privilege of those who know how to enjoy this world here and now. Most men imagine that true life lies elsewhere, and this fiction of an ideal beyond comforts them and allows them to bear their temporal condition. This fear of the ephemeral and the unstable, converted into hatred of their own life, is the source of those prodigious chimeras that are the great philosophical systems with their narcotic virtues. Inviting his reader to taste the joys of clear-sightedness, Nietzsche urges him to rid himself of the vain hope of another world, in which idealist philosophy as well as the Christian religion try to keep him. The gay science, which consists in a total embrace of the real, presupposes neither a Providence nor, of course, a philosophy of History, but implies instead a knowledge of the tragic! Courage, let us enjoy! (Paul Klein)
Novel
Miracle Morning
What do Richard Branson, head of Virgin, Anna Wintour, editor of US Vogue, Tim Cook (Apple) and Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!) have in common? Success? Certainly. A minister's schedule? That too. But above all a secret, well kept until now, and illuminating once revealed. All these figures are in the habit of getting up before dawn, and starting their day with one or two hours entirely for themselves. Two hours to exercise, meditate, better themselves, get their day underway. To become better, in short!
Getting up early, fine, but how, and to what end?
Before 8 o'clock, without fail, and in one bound, without leaving room for hesitation.
Knowing very clearly how to fill this hour or these two hours one gives oneself, like a “bonus of life”.
Making the most of this calm moment, without phone or emails, while the household sleeps, to meditate, exercise, write, read, but above all, to set the goals of one's day, each time like a new little adventure to embark on. A motivating, inspiring book, within everyone's reach.
Hal Elrod is a speaker on personal development and motivation. After a meteoric business career and a car accident that nearly cost him his life, he decided to bring about a revolution in his life by simply getting up two hours earlier.
Philosophy
Le sens du bonheur
Krishnamurti's teaching rests on the conviction that the transformation of society can only come about through the transformation of individuals.
Critical of religions and sects, Krishnamurti never tired of repeating that happiness comes through the refusal of every kind of authority.
This is the meaning of the many talks he gave over decades, all around the world. “The moment you follow someone, you cease to follow the Truth.” Think on These Things, a worldwide bestseller, allows us to see the world differently.
Unbiased and universal, Krishnamurti's words help us discover the very roots of our personal problems and of those of the society around us.
He teaches us the art of seeing and listening with our heart. And to discover the Truth that lies within us.
Philosophy
L'homme qui voulait être heureux
Imagine…
You are on holiday in Bali and, shortly before your return, you consult an old healer. For no particular reason, just because his great reputation has made you want to meet him, just in case…
His diagnosis is unequivocal: you are in good health, but you are not happy.
Bearing an infinite wisdom, this old man seems to know you better than you know yourself. The very particular light he sheds on your life is going to draw you into the most captivating adventure there is: that of self-discovery. The experiences he leads you through will turn your life upside down, giving you the keys to an existence equal to your dreams.
Novel
Huxley, Le Meilleur des mondes
“Résonances” is a series that aims to offer the essential, indispensable and unavoidable knowledge needed for an effective approach to, and study of, literary works.
Non-fiction
Pensées pour moi-même
“One feels a secret pleasure in oneself when speaking of this emperor; one cannot read his life without a kind of tenderness; such is the effect it produces that one has a better opinion of oneself, because one has a better opinion of mankind.”
Montesquieu
(back cover)
Philosophy
Les portes de la perception
Through the ingestion of mescaline, Aldous Huxley in turn joins the artificial paradise of Nerval and Baudelaire. But the originality of this experience lies in the scientific intent behind it: in 1954, it was under medical supervision that the novelist absorbed the drug with the aim of opening, in William Blake's phrase, “the doors of perception” and of “knowing, from within, what the visionary, the medium, and even the mystic spoke of, the miracle […] of existence in its nakedness, reality made manifest”. Besides this initiatory account, which gives the book its title, this volume gathers essays that bear witness to a constant spiritual quest since La Philosophie éternelle (1945). Through a syncretic culture that treats Zen Buddhist thought and Catholic dogma with equal fervour, one sees emerging a concern with setting everyone on the path to illumination through contemplation and recollection. This orientation gives Huxley's reflections on time, art, progress and, above all, violence and peace, a timeless dimension.
Novel
Le Rêve d'un homme ridicule
“I am a ridiculous man. Now they say I am mad. That would be a promotion, if they did not still find me just as ridiculous. But now I am no longer angry, now I love them all, and even when they mock me…”
Weary of the world, turned away from suicide by a chance encounter, the hero of this imprecatory monologue falls into a deep sleep. His dream then leads him towards a utopian universe, a double of the earth but without original sin, a world where men live good, free and happy.
And this gives Dostoevsky the chance to give free rein to his mystical vein, investing his hero, back in the everyday world of men after having come close to the idea of happiness, with an evangelical mission.
By the same author
Novel
Les Nuits blanches
White Nights is, first of all, a genuine love story. A solitary, romantic young man meets, one night, in a deserted Petersburg, a weeping young girl. Despairing over heartbreak, Nastenka gives herself over to the young man's fantasy; he, in love from the very first moment, lulls her, and lulls himself, in the illusion of a budding flame…
André Markowicz's new translation draws a striking stylistic effect from this novel. Discordant, ironic, the voice one hears here is indeed that of the great Russian writer, who never stopped fighting, throughout his life, in the name of truth, against deceptive elegance, whether of words or of feelings.
By the same author
Essay
Vivre autrement
We are constantly experiencing loss: birth, illness, bereavement, but also betrayal, abandonment, exile, war, are ruptures that punctuate human life. We are constantly separated from others and, sometimes, even estranged from ourselves. The ordeal of rupture can make us strangers to everything that was once familiar to us, can dislocate us to the point of madness.
One could say that the human condition is made up of the experience of ruptures just as much as of the capacity to respond to them by creating ways of integrating them into existence, by inventing structures that protect and repair these ruptures, that support and assist those who suffer from them. And, lastly, by holding on to the hope that bonds can resist the temptation of rupture. One cannot resign oneself to the idea that all human relationships are doomed to inconstancy or disappearance. In an age when everything seems ephemeral and uncertain, lasting bonds are all the more precious.
Novel
La Bibliothèque de minuit
“Between life and death there is a library, with infinite shelves and a multitude of other lives to try.”
When Nora Seeds finds herself one evening in the Midnight Library, it is her last chance to start everything over. Until now, her life has seemed to her nothing but a string of remorse and regrets. She thinks she has let down a great many people, herself most of all. But from now on, things are going to change! The books in the Midnight Library give her the chance to relive her life differently. With the help of a long-time bibliophile friend, she has only to reach out, turn the pages and correct her mistakes to invent the perfect life. Yet things do not unfold as she imagined, and her choices call into question not only her own existence, but the Midnight Library itself… And before midnight strikes, she must answer the most important riddle of all: what makes a happy life?
Novel
Ce matin-là
Twelve years earlier it was her father who had collapsed, struck down by a stroke, and Clara had taken charge because her mother was incapable of it. Ever since, Clara has managed everything, very well: a strong woman who withstands stress, overloaded schedules, her boss's unsettling remarks… But that morning the car refuses to start, and it is Clara who collapses, along with everything that makes up her life. Burnout is also a story of rebuilding, but how hard it is to lay one's life flat in order to take stock and make the right choices.
Novel
Bonjour tristesse
The villa is magnificent, the summer scorching, the Mediterranean close at hand. Cécile is seventeen years old. All she knows of love is kisses, dates, moments of weariness. Not for long. Her father, a widower, is a cheerful devotee of passing, unimportant affairs. They have fun, they need no one, they are happy. The visit of a warm-hearted, intelligent and calm woman comes to disturb this delightful disorder. How can the threat be removed? In the sun-baked pine forest, a cruel game is being prepared.
It was the summer of 1954. For the first time, one heard the dry, quick voice of a “charming little monster” who was about to cause a scandal. The second half of the twentieth century was beginning. It would be in the image of this adolescent girl, torn between remorse and the cult of pleasure.
By the same author
Philosophy
Risibles amours
“Suppose you meet a madman who claims he is a fish and that we are all fish. Are you going to argue with him? Are you going to undress in front of him to show him you have no fins? Are you going to tell him to his face what you think?” His brother said nothing, and Edouard went on: “If you told him nothing but the truth, what you truly think of him, that would mean you agree to have a serious discussion with a madman, and that you yourself are mad. It is exactly the same with the world around us. If you insisted on telling it the truth to its face, that would mean you take it seriously. And to take seriously something so unserious is to lose all seriousness oneself. As for me, I must lie, so as not to take madmen seriously and not become mad myself.”
By the same author
Literature
L'insoutenable légèreté de l'être
Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“What has remained of the dying of Cambodia? A large photograph of the American star holding a yellow child in her arms. What has remained of Tomas? An inscription: He wanted the Kingdom of God on earth. What has remained of Beethoven? A morose man with an improbable mane of hair, pronouncing in a sombre voice: ‘Es muss sein!’ What has remained of Franz? An inscription: After a long wandering, the return. And so on, and so on. Before being forgotten, we shall be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the relay station between being and oblivion.”
More than Kundera's other novels, this one is a love story. Tereza is jealous. Her jealousy, tamed by day, awakens at night, disguised as dreams that are in fact poems about death. On her long path, the young woman is accompanied, for her husband, Tomas, half Don Juan, half Tristan, is torn between his love for her and his insurmountable libertine temptations.
The fate of Sabina, one of Tomas's mistresses, extends the fabric of the novel to the whole world. Intelligent and sentimental, she leaves Franz, her great Genevan love, and runs after her freedom, from Europe to America, only to find, in the end, nothing but “the unbearable lightness of being”.
Indeed, which quality (gravity or lightness) best corresponds to the human condition? And where does seriousness stop and give way to the frivolous, and vice versa? With his art of paradox, Kundera poses these questions through a text built from a few simple elements that are constantly enriched with new nuances, in a play of variations where narrative, dream and reflection, prose and poetry, recent history and ancient history are united. Never, perhaps, in Kundera's work, have gravity and casualness been so united as in this text. Death here wears a double face: that of a soft, dreamlike sadness, and that of a cruel, black farce.
For this novel is also a meditation on death: that of individuals, but also, potentially, that of our old Europe.
(Back cover of the 1984 Gallimard edition)
By the same author
Literature
Narcisse et Goldmund
Nothing can stop Goldmund's wandering, no woman, not even the misery, the plague or the death he encounters along the way.
Thirsting for pleasure, hungry for feminine beauty, he tirelessly takes up this road again and again, where every encounter tests the most beautiful and the darkest sides of humanity. Within this candid and generous spirit breaks through a revolt born of injustice, of the cruelty of men, where only art and creation lighten the weight of this fallen humanity that bears down on him.
And yet, giving up the fullness of existence, his unfailing attachment to freedom, in order to fulfil his destiny as a creator, is a dilemma Goldmund refuses to settle. The one constant: Narcissus, his guardian angel, who, through his disinterested love, had led him onto the paths of the heart.
Narcissus and Goldmund, more than an initiatory tale, is an ode to fleeting life through the quest for beauty and for “the eternal Eve”: the mother.
Hermann Hesse, Nobel Prize in Literature, here signs, with a pen as smooth as stone, a masterpiece of pure emotion. (Lenaïc Gravis and Jocelyn Blériot)
By the same author
Novel
Demian
A novel of initiation and formation, Demian is one of the masterpieces of this literary genre.
How can a man escape the world of mirrors and manage to be himself? Demian (a name close to the Greek daimon, the inner voice) teaches young Emil Sinclair not to follow his parents' example, to rebel in order to find himself, to pass through chaos in order to earn the fulfilment of his own destiny. At the end of this path, where the divine and the demonic intermingle, the fear of being an exile, a separated being, a stranger, is annihilated.
There is no measure of the human other than freedom.
By the same author
Literature
Siddhartha
A day comes when the traditional teaching given to the Brahmins is no longer enough for the young Siddhartha.
When ascetic samanas pass through the town, he follows them, familiarises himself with all their practices, but cannot find the peace of soul he seeks. Then comes the encounter with Gotama, the Buddha. While recognising the sublimity of his doctrine, he cannot accept it, and begins another life alongside the beautiful Kamala and the merchant Kamaswani. The riches he acquires make him a new man, a materialist, a character he eventually comes to dislike.
He sets off through the forest, to the edge of the river. It is there that the final phase of the cycle of his development is fulfilled.
Set against a wonderfully recreated India, written in a style of rare mastery, Siddhartha, a novel of initiation, is one of the greatest works by Hermann Hesse, Nobel Prize in Literature.
By the same author
Literature
Le Loup des steppes
“Steppenwolf holds a place apart in the work of Hermann Hesse. It is among the most significant of his novels. It could be dated to today, so closely does the sickness of living it describes resemble the experiences of contemporary novelists. It is not excessive to say that it is the first existentialist novel.
Steppenwolf tells of the solitary, wholly spiritual adventure of a man who cannot manage to adapt to the world, separated from others both by his intellectual riches and by his emotional failings, and to whom women try, little by little, to teach the joys of the senses. This theme is renewed by the subtlety of the analysis and the beauty of the form.
Hermann Hesse created, after his own genius, an atmosphere in which the real and the fantastic become indistinguishable, in which the simplest episodes take on symbolic value, in which symbols merge with everyday life.
The author gave the book the form of a posthumous diary of the steppenwolf, a diary preceded by the account of the man who, according to the novel's fiction, delivers this confession to the public.”
By the same author
Novel
Trois fois dès l'aube
Two characters meet on three occasions. A man begins talking with a woman in his hotel lobby and, when she feels faint, he takes her into his room. Their conversation continues, the man opens up to her, but it does him no good. A hotel porter helps a young female guest flee in order to escape her companion, a violent and dangerous man.
Older than her, he reveals that he spent thirteen years in prison following a murder. Malcolm, the character from the first encounter, is still a child when his parents die in the fire that destroys their house. To spare him the aftermath of this tragedy and take him somewhere safe, a police inspector brings him to one of her friends.
Three nocturnal stories that end at dawn and that mark, each in its own way, a new beginning. Three facets that Alessandro Baricco brings together into a hypnotic and powerful narrative, not without elegance, and even sensuality.
By the same author
Novel
Mr Gwyn
A British novelist in the prime of life, Jasper Gwyn has three novels to his name, which have earned him honest public and critical success. And yet he publishes an article in The Guardian in which he draws up a list of the fifty-two things he will no longer do, the last of which is: writing a novel.
His agent, Tom Bruce Shepperd, takes this declaration for a provocation, but, when he calls the writer, he understands that it is not one: Gwyn is entirely determined.
He simply does not know what he is going to do next. At the end of a sabbatical year, he has found it: he wants to create portraits, in the manner of a painter, but written portraits that are not banal descriptions.
To this end, he looks for a studio, takes care over the light, the soundscape and the décor, then sets off in search of models. This is the beginning of an extraordinary experiment that will put the repentant writer through a harsh trial.
What is an artist? Alessandro Baricco asks himself, in this intriguing, brilliant and tremendously elegant novel. To answer this question, he invites us to follow the path of his Mr Gwyn, half sophisticated game, half comical adventure. And, if he gives us the key to the Gwyn mystery, the outcome will naturally be unexpected.
By the same author
Novel
Océan mer
A long time ago, in the middle of an ocean, a French naval frigate was wrecked. A hundred and forty-seven men tried to escape by climbing onto a raft. A horror that dragged on for days and days, during which the utmost ferocity and the gentlest pity were both to be seen.
A long time ago, on the shore of the ocean, a man arrived. What had brought him there was a promise. The guest house where he stopped was called Almayer's. Seven rooms. Strange children, a painter, a very beautiful woman, a professor with a curious name, a mysterious man, a young girl who did not want to die, an amusing priest. All of them there, searching for something, balanced on the ocean.
A long time ago, these fates and others met the sea and came back from it marked. This book tells their stories, because in listening to them, one hears the Voice of the sea. It can be read as a suspenseful tale, a prose poem, a philosophical story or an adventure novel. What dominates, in any case, is the sheer joy of storytelling, through a style and a novelistic technique with neither models nor precedents.
By the same author
Literature
Soie
Around 1860, in order to save silkworm farms contaminated by an epidemic, Hervé Joncour sets off for Japan. Between the mountains of the Vivarais and Japan, it is the clash of two worlds, a story of love and war, a marvellous alchemy that weaves the novel out of impalpable threads. Long, dangerous journeys, impossible loves that carry on without ever having begun, characters of desire and passion, the velvet of a voice, the sanctification of a magnificent and sensual fabric, and slowness, the slowness of the seasons and of unchanging time.
From its very publication, Silk established Alessandro Baricco as the most talented of the young Italian writers.
“He was, besides, one of those men who like to watch their own life, considering any ambition to live it as somehow out of place.”
(Back cover of the 1996 Albin Michel edition)
By the same author
Novel
La Côte sauvage
First edition: 1960.
After two years of military service, Olivier comes back to spend his holidays at the family house in Brittany, where his mother and his two sisters are waiting for him.
The youngest, Anne, to whom he has been tenderly attached since childhood, tells him she is going to marry Pierre, Olivier's best friend. When Pierre joins them in Brittany, Olivier, sacrificing their friendship, tries to prevent the marriage; he discourages his sister, alarms and humiliates Pierre.
Why does he want his sister Anne to stay by his side? Is it a love that dares not speak its name? Will Olivier manage to change like the season and rediscover the other side of his life? He is capable of anything, silently, even of killing himself, and the soft landscape, of mist and veiled sunlight, may soon become nothing more than the final setting of his life.
Source: Le Livre de Poche, LGF
Novel
Une petite robe de fête
“The one we love, we see her stepping forward entirely naked. She is wearing a light dress, like those that used to blossom on Sundays beneath church porches, on ballroom floors. And yet she is naked, like a star at daybreak. On seeing you, a clearing opened up in my eyes. On seeing this white dress, white as the blue sky. With the simple gaze, pure strength returns.”
Novel
Le Guerrier pacifique
“It all began in December 1966, which marked the start of an extraordinary series of events in my life. I was in my third year at the University of California, Berkeley. One day at twenty past three in the morning, in an all-night petrol station, I met Socrates for the first time. (He did not tell me his real name, but after spending a moment with him that night, I instinctively called him after the ancient Greek sage; he liked the name and it stuck.) This chance encounter, along with the adventures that followed, was going to change my life.” The man the author calls Socrates really existed. Almost a hundred years old, Socrates displays a formidable youthfulness of spirit and a scathing sense of humour. In contact with him, Dan, a top-level athlete weary of life, sees his beliefs completely overturned. Guided by the eccentric old sorcerer, Dan gradually triumphs over his fears and his illusions, to live as a lover and a warrior… a peaceful one.
Literature
Le Petit Prince
The Little Prince comes from a planet barely bigger than himself, on which there are baobabs and a very precious flower, who plays the coquette and for whom he feels responsible. The Little Prince loves the sunset. One day, he watched it forty-four times! He has also visited other planets and met very important people who did not know how to answer his questions. On Earth, he tamed the fox, who became his friend. And he met the aviator stranded in the middle of the Sahara desert. So, he asked him: “Please… draw me a sheep!”
Literature
L'Alchimiste
Santiago, a young Andalusian shepherd, sets off in search of a treasure buried at the foot of the Pyramids. When he meets the Alchemist in the desert, the Alchemist teaches him to listen to his heart, to read the signs of destiny and, above all, to follow his dream to the very end.
A marvellous philosophical tale for the child who sleeps within every human being, this book has already left its mark on a generation of readers.
Literature
L'Étranger
When the bell rang once more, when the door of the dock opened, it was the silence of the courtroom that rose up towards me, the silence, and that strange sensation I had when I noticed that the young journalist had looked away. I did not look towards Marie. I did not have the time, because the presiding judge told me, in a bizarre form of words, that I would have my head cut off in a public square in the name of the French people….
By the same author
Non-fiction
Promesses et utopies
While many commentators are announcing the end of the Internet and the Web as we have known them (that is, as democratic means of communication that made it easier for emancipated communities to form), what remains today of the utopias and forms of resistance developed on these networks? This anthology of the political manifestos of the Web and Internet communities answers that question by retracing the will to transform things that has never stopped driving them: from the first struggles of the nascent “cyberspace” to today’s resistance to artificial intelligence, by way of the rebellious upheavals of cyberfeminism.
Bringing together twenty-nine texts from different eras and communities, this book is a genuine introduction to digital culture. It explores the archives of the Internet, but also the little-known history of the hackers, artists and computer scientists who worked on its design, its imaginary and its evolution. It also traces the broken promises, and the prospects for political and technological alternatives that remain open in the digital field.
Essay
Malaise dans la génération Z
Generation Z: the name given to those born between 1995 and 2013, who are now between 13 and 31 years old. They are our children, our grandchildren, our friends, our partners. Armed with their smartphones and social networks, they have lived through the 2008 crisis, the 2015 attacks and the Covid period. And they are not well. All the specialists share the finding of a specific mental health crisis affecting Generation Z: it is more depressed, more anxious, more fragile and unhappier than every generation before it. But the reasons for this malaise, and the remedies to bring to it, are the subject of intense debate. Pierre Valentin sets out to trace the deepest causes of this distress. While new technologies and lockdowns have certainly contributed to it, they have only intensified broader individualist dynamics. Behind the psychological distress emerges the portrait of a generation that radicalises the tendencies at work throughout society, and perhaps heralds the world of tomorrow. Its suffering betrays a moral and cultural crisis: a crisis of meaning.
