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How often one hears people admonishing others, or sometimes even themselves, to “stop and smell the roses,” to pause from the hustle and bustle of the workaday world in order to appreciate the “little things” in life. Such appreciation requires a special attentiveness to the moment, a skill that not everyone possesses in equal degree—I do not have much of it myself, I don’t think. But Philippe Delerm, author of Second Star, and Other Reasons for Lingering, is a grand master of attentiveness.
Second Star, published by Archipelago Books and translated from the French by Jody Gladding, is a collection of short vignettes, only two to three pages long, “literary snapshots,” as Delerm calls them. (Here I digress briefly to say that Archipelago, which publishes beautiful and distinctively designed translations of books from around the world, is one of my favorite presses; I once published a small tribute to them, “A Literary World Tour.”) Each of them has a precise, narrow focus on a particular object, action, or encounter—the taste of a raw turnip clandestinely snatched from the kitchen, the attempt to catch a waiter’s eye without appearing overly assertive, the liberation of leaving a disappointing show at intermission, an elegant woman expertly feeling a dress in order to test the quality of its fabric—and probes its inner significance.
Delerm has a remarkable knack for what one might call humanistic analysis of the passing moment. He uncovers the unspoken meaning of half-conscious actions like stepping aside to allow someone to pass on the sidewalk, or walking with one’s hands clasped behind one’s back. In doing so, he not only extends these moments in time but also accentuates their meaning, enabling us to notice a significance in them to which we are, ordinarily, oblivious.
These snapshots are often quite delightful, and the temptation in writing about such a book is merely to quote extensively from Delerm’s observations. I shall (mostly) resist the temptation, but here is a trio of typical examples:
—You can hold him, if you want to!
You always want to. Taking a baby in one’s arms is a privilege, a proof of trust that you want only to confirm.
Who doesn’t enjoy the chance to hold a baby? But Delerm adds a small note of psychological insight: to be offered the baby is a vote of confidence, a sign that the mother trusts you with her most precious possession and believes the baby will take to you as well. And what happens next? You begin to sway, to bounce, to jiggle, to dance, to begin an “immobile polka,” in Delerm’s phrase: “Wanting to give that peace while remaining in place, you abandon yourself to an affable, vertical dance, a little ridiculous, but you don’t care. You’re holding infancy against you, in the hollow of you.”
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Folding the sheets. There’s something special in those three words. A serenity. After the sheets are folded, they’re stacked in the closet…. But first, there’s this dance to do: one of you steps back, opposite the other, as for a pavane. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never danced it. You feel the ancestral choreography of this folding, this silent dialogue…. Both arms raised, you feel like both the village yokel and court nobility.
Another dancing image! Funny that I should have turned down the page corner on two of those. But what Delerm captures here so nicely is the sense of ritual in mundane, everyday activities. You can fold most of the laundry yourself, but when it comes to the sheets, you seek a partner, and then you stand facing each other, repeating a familiar set of movements in what becomes almost a kind of liturgy. We don’t often think about it, of course, but that is what Delerm does so well: he hits the pause button on our daily activities and freezes a brief moment for our observation and reflection.
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Even while you’re talking, walking alone, you can feel yourself gradually giving in to the temptation. It’s the gesture that prompts the desire: to undo the button and turn back the cuff just above the wrist, nowhere close to the elbow…. Two turns over the forearm, no more, but you’re a different creature in the world, a free man, something of an artist, who manages the feat of maintaining a balance between laid-back and sophisticated.
Perhaps I enjoy that passage because, I confess, I invariably roll up my sleeves. But again it’s the small psychological insight about our emotional interaction with the physical world that Delerm captures so well. This is what makes the passage work and makes the reader pause, that quick, don’t-blink-or-you-missed-it observation: “you’re a different creature in the world, a free man.” In fewer than ten words, Delerm sums up that slight difference in attitude that the rolled-up sleeve (but no more than two turns!) embodies.
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Second Star offers many more examples like these, and each reader will have his or her special favorites. Often this is because (as with my shirt-sleeves) you recognize yourself in what Delerm is describing. But there are very few of these “literary snapshots” at which the reader will not feel some spontaneous quiver of recognition. Even when his mood is gently teasing and his keen eye lights up our typical foibles, Delerm always seems to be saying with Terence, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” By paying close attention to our ordinary activities and taking them seriously, he lends everyday life a certain light-hearted dignity, giving it an almost sacramental quality. To which the reader responds with implicit gratitude.
The collection’s overall mood is joyful, but it is also tinged with a hint of bittersweetness. This is because Delerm’s art thrives on the tension between evanescence and permanence. When he freezes a moment in time, it seems briefly to flirt with eternity, as if we could hang onto it. As he concludes a brief reflection on the pocket watch, “Time did not devour us so when we kept it comfortably in a watch pocket.”
But of course we cannot hang onto it, as Delerm well knows. Indeed, our contemporary technology offers a visual metaphor for time’s passing, as Delerm observes in describing the swiping of a finger across a smartphone screen, nudging a photo off stage and out of mind. “It’s not at all like a photo that you hold, adjust, glue at the four corners,” he writes. As one swipes away, one’s life shuffles off into a questionable oblivion. “You can make all those you believe you’ve held, everything you believe you’ve done, glide across a mirror.”
That interplay between our desire for permanence and the relentless march of time sits at the heart of human life. Indeed, the very tenuousness of present experience makes it all the more precious: “Unbelievable as it is, to truly make the most of a summer evening, the idea of its fragility must be at the heart of it, the feeling that we are experiencing this for the last time.” With his art of “lingering,” Philippe Delerm helps us “remember the present” and thereby appreciate it as it deserves.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you again next week for another installment From My Bookshelf.
Many thanks, Peter. On the strength of this review I'm going to pick up a copy from the library this weekend; I see that the French title is La Première gorgée de bière, et autres plaisirs minuscules (The First Sip of Beer and Other Small Pleasures).