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March 14, 1989, with my 14th birthday just a day away, I discern a distant melody – a dissonant symphony, an improvised soundtrack, punctuated with explosions, flashes and the weighty echo of thunder. “You won’t be going to school tomorrow!” they declare.
On my special day, I receive the exquisite joy of indolence – a late awakening and the gentle tranquility of adolescent slothfulness. Yet, I sense a subtle unease in my parents’ gaze. Without any apparent cause, all that turmoil is distant. Little do I know that war, like insidious cancer, can spread from an inconsequential event, like the lava of a volcano, until it ultimately taints my universe with gray.
Soon, the once distant turmoil will be the harsh reality of others, as my own sky becomes shrouded with the unbearable likelihood of thunder that steals my peace, blows out my windows, disfigures my family’s comfort and buries my budding romances. Everything is blown to smithereens in an instant, yet peculiarly, in this fevered moment of loss, a joy born from daydreams, seeking solace in the parallel and solitary worls offered by books, cinema, music and television.
When I reminisce about those bitter days, my memories are a novel by Balzac, Père Goriot, a film by Buñuel, Belle de Jour, TV shows by Bernard Pivot and songs by Brel on a crackling cassette tape.
With Milan Kundera’s passing, the significance of his novel’s title Life is Elsewhere has finally become clear to me. Although the plot and style have faded from my memory, a title alone can often evoke a sense of nostalgia for the simple joys of life. Les choses de la vie (The Things of Life), both insignificant and magnificent, tear apart like the tortured face of Michel Piccoli in the wild dance of his car. In the end, only the essence of life remains – the comfort of friendship, the gentle gaze of love and the legacy of culture that endures like a blissful, stubborn nostalgia.
During the long months that followed that ill-fated March 14, when I was isolated from my friends, confined in makeshift shelters, hunted by the ominous noise of projectiles raining down capriciously, I forged the shell of Life is Elsewhere. I came to love the world as a projection, a fatalism of future enjoyment, an uncertain determinism of the presence of a joy that should not be “fled for fear it would escape,” but conquered with simple knowledge, popular culture and the daily gesture of joy.
Joy is a never-ending race; as soon as we grasp it, it slips away. This long-anticipated future turns into a longing that sends our joyous moments back into the past. But this nostalgia is ultimately our heritage and enriches our culture and our identities.
In an interview with Alain Bashung, I heard him utter this magnificently genuine statement, “I do not like complacent happiness.” Complacent happiness is akin to boredom. Life, perhaps, is not elsewhere; it dwells in the audacity of everyday life. We must imbibe it until our last breath as it is the only wealth worthy of acquisition and preservation at all costs.
