The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson
Authors: Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson
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No. 3
Go on, catch up with her!
W hen I think there are people who don’t have television! How do they manage? I could spend hours watching. I turn the sound off and watch. I feel as if I’m watching things with an X-ray. If you turn the sound off, in fact, you’re removing the wrapping paper, the pretty tissue paper enveloping some two-bit piece of rubbish. If you watch the television news reports in this way, you’ll see: the images have no connection to each other, the only thing that does link them is the commentary, which wants you to take a chronological succession of images for a real succession of events.
Anyway, I love television. And this afternoon I saw an interesting movement of the world: a diving contest. Several contests, in fact. It was a retrospective of all the world championships in this particular sport. There were individual dives, with compulsory figures and freestyle, men and women, but above all, what caught my interest was the synchronized diving. In addition to their individual prowess with all these twists, somersaults and flips, the two divers have to be synchronized. Not just more or less together, no: perfectly together, to the very thousandth of a second.
The funniest thing is when the divers have very different builds: a stocky little person with a long slim one. You tell yourself, this will never work; from a physical point of view, they cannot take off and arrive at the same time, but they do, go figure. Object lesson: in the world, everything is compensation. When you can’t go as fast, you push harder. But here’s where I found subject matter for my journal: two young Chinese women got up on the springboard. Two long slim goddesses with shining black braids, who could have been twins, they looked so alike, but the commentator made a point of saying they weren’t even sisters. In short, they went out on the springboard and at that point I think we must have all been doing the same thing: holding our breath.
Following a few graceful bounces, they jumped. The first microseconds were perfect. I felt that perfection in my body; it would seem it’s a question of “mirror neurons”: when you watch someone doing something, the same neurons that they activate in order to do something become active in your brain, without you doing a thing. An acrobatic dive without budging from the sofa and while eating potato chips: that’s why we like watching sports on television. Anyway, the two graces jump and, right at the beginning, it’s ecstasy. And then, catastrophe! All at once you get the impression that they are very very slightly out of synch. You stare at the screen, a knot in your stomach: no doubt about it, they are out of synch. I know it seems crazy to describe it like this when the jump itself cannot last more than maybe three seconds in all but, precisely because it doesn’t last more than three seconds, you look at every phase as if it lasted a century. And now it has become clear, you can no longer hide from the truth: they are out of synch! One of them is going to reach the water before the other! It’s horrible!
I sat there shouting at the television: go on, catch up with her, go on! I felt incredibly angry with the one who had dawdled. I sunk deeper into the sofa, disgusted. What is this? Is that the movement of the world? An infinitesimal lapse that has just succeeded in ruining the possibility of perfection forever? I spent at least half an hour in a foul mood. And then suddenly I wondered: but why did I want so desperately for her to catch up? Why does it feel so rotten when the movement is not in synch? It’s not very hard to come up with an answer: all those things that pass before us, which we miss by a hair and which are botched for eternity . . . All the words we should have said, gestures we should have made, the fleeting moments of kairos that were there one day and that we did not know how to grasp and that were buried forever in the void . . . Failure, by a
Go on, catch up with her!
W hen I think there are people who don’t have television! How do they manage? I could spend hours watching. I turn the sound off and watch. I feel as if I’m watching things with an X-ray. If you turn the sound off, in fact, you’re removing the wrapping paper, the pretty tissue paper enveloping some two-bit piece of rubbish. If you watch the television news reports in this way, you’ll see: the images have no connection to each other, the only thing that does link them is the commentary, which wants you to take a chronological succession of images for a real succession of events.
Anyway, I love television. And this afternoon I saw an interesting movement of the world: a diving contest. Several contests, in fact. It was a retrospective of all the world championships in this particular sport. There were individual dives, with compulsory figures and freestyle, men and women, but above all, what caught my interest was the synchronized diving. In addition to their individual prowess with all these twists, somersaults and flips, the two divers have to be synchronized. Not just more or less together, no: perfectly together, to the very thousandth of a second.
The funniest thing is when the divers have very different builds: a stocky little person with a long slim one. You tell yourself, this will never work; from a physical point of view, they cannot take off and arrive at the same time, but they do, go figure. Object lesson: in the world, everything is compensation. When you can’t go as fast, you push harder. But here’s where I found subject matter for my journal: two young Chinese women got up on the springboard. Two long slim goddesses with shining black braids, who could have been twins, they looked so alike, but the commentator made a point of saying they weren’t even sisters. In short, they went out on the springboard and at that point I think we must have all been doing the same thing: holding our breath.
Following a few graceful bounces, they jumped. The first microseconds were perfect. I felt that perfection in my body; it would seem it’s a question of “mirror neurons”: when you watch someone doing something, the same neurons that they activate in order to do something become active in your brain, without you doing a thing. An acrobatic dive without budging from the sofa and while eating potato chips: that’s why we like watching sports on television. Anyway, the two graces jump and, right at the beginning, it’s ecstasy. And then, catastrophe! All at once you get the impression that they are very very slightly out of synch. You stare at the screen, a knot in your stomach: no doubt about it, they are out of synch. I know it seems crazy to describe it like this when the jump itself cannot last more than maybe three seconds in all but, precisely because it doesn’t last more than three seconds, you look at every phase as if it lasted a century. And now it has become clear, you can no longer hide from the truth: they are out of synch! One of them is going to reach the water before the other! It’s horrible!
I sat there shouting at the television: go on, catch up with her, go on! I felt incredibly angry with the one who had dawdled. I sunk deeper into the sofa, disgusted. What is this? Is that the movement of the world? An infinitesimal lapse that has just succeeded in ruining the possibility of perfection forever? I spent at least half an hour in a foul mood. And then suddenly I wondered: but why did I want so desperately for her to catch up? Why does it feel so rotten when the movement is not in synch? It’s not very hard to come up with an answer: all those things that pass before us, which we miss by a hair and which are botched for eternity . . . All the words we should have said, gestures we should have made, the fleeting moments of kairos that were there one day and that we did not know how to grasp and that were buried forever in the void . . . Failure, by a
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