vu, lu, ou entendu cette semaine

« I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend… If you have one… »
George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

« Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second… If there is one… »
Winston Churchill to George Bernard Shaw

lu, vu, ou entendu cette semaine

« For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you. »
Daniel Mendelsohn, « The Lost, A search for six of six million »

Non, je ne suis pas entré dans la secte des adorateurs de Daniel Mendelsohn. Mais son dernier bouquin est puissant.

vu, lu, ou entendu cette semaine

« For a few minutes we discussed the progress of the war [in Iraq], which was a sensitive subject just then if you were an American traveling in Europe, where the war was not popular – although to be sure, the subject was not as sensitive as it would become eight weeks later, after the revelation about prisonner abuse by American soldiers […] The reason I would have liked to bring the subject up was this: among the abuses said to have taken place was a certain bizarre humiliation that took the form of forcing the naked prisoners to climb on top each other in order to form a living pyramid. When I first read about this in the papers, two months after I returned from Copenhaguen, I was struck forcefully by this detail, since I remembered of course the detail, one of the first we ever learned about the Nazi torture of Bolechow’s Jews, that Olga in Bolechow had told us about, that August day in 2001: how, during the first Aktion, the Germans and Ukrainians had forced naked Jews in the Dom Katolicki to climb on top of one another, forming a human pyramid with the rabbi at the top. What was it, I wondered when I read about Abu Ghraib, what was this impulse to degrade that took the specific form of building pyramids with human flesh? But after a while it occurred to me that this particular type of degradation was a perfect if perverted symbol of the abandonment of civilized values; since after all the impulse to pile one thing atop another, the impulse to build, the impulse – spread across continents and civilizations – to build pyramids, whether in Egypt or Peru, can be seen as the earliest expression of the mysterious human instinct to create, to make something out of nothing, to be civilized. I, who had spent so much time reading about the Egyptians, sat and read the newspaper on April morning in 2004 and looked at the fuzzy photograph of the ungainly naked human pyramid, which for all we know was how certain Jews in the Dom Katolicki looked on October 28, 1941, and thought, There it all was, contained in this small triangle: the best of human instincts and the worst, the heights of civilization and the depths of bestiality, the making of something out of nothing and the making of nothing out of something. Pyramids of stone, pyramids of flesh. »
Daniel Mendelsohn, « The Lost, A search for six of six million »

Passage énorme.

J’ai joué pour moi-même…

«Il y avait un public, mais j’ai joué pour moi-même (…) J’ai demandé à Dieu de réconcilier les deux parties de l’Europe et de mon cœur».

Rostropovitch raconta par ces mots son interprétation improvisée de Bach au pied du mur de Berlin en novembre 1989. Pour seuls accompagnements, le brouhaha de la foule s’amassant autour de ce monument vivant de la musique, alors que le son des marteaux piqueurs oeuvraient pour la chute du monument de la honte.

Quoi de plus émouvant pour accompagner ce moment d’histoire où la moitié de la planète bascule du côté de la liberté, qu’une suite de Bach interprétée par un homme capable de s’opposer seul à l’empire soviétique.

Quel privilège pour ceux qui passaient par là alors que cet homme pose son tabouret, sort son instrument, et se met à interpréter Bach: spectateurs tolérés d’un moment où cet immense musicien ne joue pas pour eux, mais pour lui; témoins uniques d’une prière musicale pour un monde meilleur, et d’un homme qui ce jour là, incarna à lui tout seul la rencontre entre l’Art et l’Histoire.