Alain Cugno, How Should One Go About Living? L’Iconoclaste, 2014.
by Jano Xhenseval
Revue Études, February 2015
No review can truly account for this very beautiful book without speaking of the extreme gratuity of the dragonfly’s flight. For it is indeed a flight that amazes us as much by its precision in movement as by its precision in landing, where nothing suggested its intention – except its intimacy and its uselessness.
Alain Cugno had already written The Philosopher and the Dragonfly, and here, in this subtle moment between appearance and absence, he invites us to engage with reality with the familiarity of angels. We must traverse, in small leaps, these intimate meadows through the pages, among the grasses, these stretches of soul, these barren lands, these beats of the sky, to hear: « Once upon a time, there was an angel… ». And the story will be ours. To speak of the proximity of angels? But who are they? One must visit these translucent leaves, these filaments of the spirit, to allow their encounter. « This is not proof, » said Paul Beauchamp, « for it is nothing external. »
This is philosophy in a bird’s flight, with its depth, that is to say, its simplicity. A liturgy of the springs that refreshes the senses. This journey is not an itinerary or a recipe book, but could say, like Francis Jammes’ wasp: « I no longer knew what I was doing because I was doing it. »
François Cheng, On the Soul, Albin-Michel, 2016.
by Jano Xhenseval
Revue Études, January 2017
To speak of the soul is as natural for François Cheng as to speak of dawn and its lightness. There are seven letters that tell us this day by day and in the gravity of the moment. They require from the reader the same presence, the same fidelity to memory as that of the author. Thank you to François Cheng for sharing these intimate letters, his journey to the source, without the reader ever feeling distanced.
As we read these fragments of life, we are seized by the same question: Where is the soul toward which we all journey? And who is it?
To read in the flow of days… the order is revealed to us in the fragility of the moment and their overwhelming truth, with an ultimate recourse: the grace of forgetting! This intimate correspondence never leaves us alone.
Seven living letters. A secret accord on unpredictable movement… Something irreversible at the heart of reality.
The favor of the stars is to invite us to speak,
René Char, The Talismanic Night
to show us that we are not alone,
that dawn has a roof and my fire your two hands.
Open this wonderful book with the same anticipation for answers as that which prompted François Cheng’s encounter with his mysterious correspondent.