L’Usure du Monde, 2005
Tribute to Nicolas Bouvier
You think you’re going to read The Use of the World, and soon it’s The Use of the World that binds you. That’s how it starts: at first you can’t read anything else, then you can’t read anything else, but soon you can’t read anything at all. Bouvier’s way of squeezing out every moment of happiness down to the last essential drop, and of keeping this distillate in the vials of his memory to draw from it his survival each time happiness no longer wanted to be there… and you, by that yardstick, you perceive so violently the central catastrophe that it must have represented for Nicolas Bouvier, to have frozen this road in such a parsimony of words so made for each other, that it has become intolerable for you not to be him, at the time and place he says.
We had this book to exorcise, to reopen, to accept again so that it could become a companion on the road and in life – that is to say, to tell how it is possible today, to paraphrase Nicolas, to “get rid” of The Use of the World.
Others than us facing the same obstacle have had the chance to settle the matter face to face with him. This is not our case. Nicolas Bouvier died in 1998. At that time L’Usage had not yet completely paralysed us. Years later, when it became urgent to unload this fact, all we were able to do, with Nicolas absent, was to set off on a journey.
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