Une aventure londonienne

C’est un texte de Virginia Woolf que j’ai découvert par hasard vendredi dernier (merci M. !) Il s’appelle Street Haunting : A London adventure, et il a été écrit en 1927. Je l’ai instantanément adoré (re-clin d’oeil à M. !) parce qu’il m’a rappelé ma récente promenade, deux jours auparavant, et surtout l’état d’esprit dans lequel j’étais lors de celle-ci, même si V.W. parle d’une flânerie qui a lieu une soirée d’hiver.

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. (...) [S]o when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a pencil,” as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter—rambling the streets of London.

(Etrangement, dans Poetry de Lee Chang-dong, que je verrais quelques heures après avoir lu ce texte, un des personnages se lance aussi à la recherche d’un crayon de papier... Moi j'aime les crayons à mine. J’aime leurs étuis de plastique aux couleurs acidulées. J’en achète sans cesse.)

The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. (...) We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.

(Quant à moi je préfère me promener dans Londres dans la journée, entre 14h et 17h, et rentrer chez moi entre chien et loup. )

For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience. That bowl on the mantelpiece, for instance, was bought at Mantua on a windy day. (...) [W]e carried it back to the little hotel where, in the middle of the night, the innkeeper quarreled so violently with his wife that we all leant out into the courtyard to look, and saw the vines laced about among the pillars and the stars white in the sky. The moment was stabilized, stamped like a coin indelibly among a million that slipped by imperceptibly. (...) All this--Italy, the windy morning, the vines laced about the pillars, the Englishman and the secrets of his soul—rise up in a cloud from the china bowl on the mantelpiece.

J’aime le passage ci-dessus qui me rappelle l’épisode de la petite madeleine chez Proust :

Et comme dans ce jeu où les Japonais s’amusent à tremper dans un bol de porcelaine rempli d’eau, de petits morceaux de papier jusque-là indistincts qui, à peine y sont-ils plongés s’étirent, se contournent, se colorent, se différencient, deviennent des fleurs, des maisons, des personnages consistants et reconnaissables, de même maintenant toutes les fleurs de notre jardin et celles du parc de M. Swann, et les nymphéas de la Vivonne, et les bonnes gens du village et leurs petits logis et l’église et tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela que prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé.

One must, one always must, do something or other; it is not allowed one simply to enjoy oneself. Was it not for this reason that, some time ago, we fabricated the excuse, and invented the necessity of buying something? But what was it? Ah, we remember, it was a pencil. Let us go then and buy this pencil. (...)Spread out behind the rod of duty we see the whole breadth of the river Thames—wide, mournful, peaceful. And we see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person—and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves. For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then—calm, aloof, content? Let us try then.

(Moi aussi je pensais à celle que j’étais cet été, celle qui était vraiment calm, aloof and content, without a care in the world quand elle se baladait sur les bords de la Tamise. Mais ce mercredi après-midi-là je l’étais aussi !) Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for convenience sake a man must be a whole. That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures. Still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. Here again is the usual door; here the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet. And here—let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence—is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.

Quel butin ai-je ramené de ma promenade? Contrairement à V.W. le but de ma sortie n’était pas un crayon de papier, mais une séance de cinéma. Alors ce sont des images de Londres mâtinées de Chine que j’examine tendrement et avec révérence.