In the Café of Lost Youth (New York Review Books Classics)

by Patrick Modiano

At the halfway point of the journey making up real life, we were surrounded by a gloomy melancholy, one expressed by so very many derisive and sorrowful words in the café of the lost youth. —GUY DEBORD

When I look up “bohemian” in the dictionary, I find: A person who leads a wandering life, without rules or worries about the next day.

I’ve always believed that certain places are like magnets and draw you towards them should you happen to walk within their radius. And this occurs imperceptibly, without you even suspecting. All it takes is a sloping street, a sunny sidewalk, or maybe a shady one. Or perhaps a downpour. And this leads you straight there, to the exact spot you’re meant to wash up.

Bowing had only managed to fix his shadow for a few seconds.

somnambulist’s

For me, autumn has never been a sad season. The dying leaves and the days that grow shorter and shorter have never evoked the end of something for me but instead brought with them anticipation for the future.

In Paris, during these October evenings, there is an electricity in the air at dusk. Even when it rains. I don’t feel down at that time of night, nor does it seem that time is passing too swiftly. I have the feeling that anything is possible. The year begins in the month of October.

For me, the Condé was a refuge from all the drabness I anticipated in life. There will one day be a part of me—the best part—that I will be forced to leave behind there.

As you tell of this imaginary life, great breaths of fresh air rush across a closed room in which you have been unable to breathe for a long time. A window abruptly opens, the shutters bang in the breeze. You have, once again, a future before you.

We live at the mercy of certain silences. We have all known things about each other for a long time. So we try to avoid each other. It would be for the best, of course, if none of us were ever to see each other again.

We never grow up. As the years go by, many people and many things end up seeming so humorous and so pathetic that all you can do is try to look at them through the eyes of a child.

“Caisley, you go way too far, way too fast. You ought to have been a novelist.”

Well, sure, I understood. In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and the lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters.

What connection can resist the tide as it carries you away and diverts your course?

those two words evoked for me a meadow beneath the moon,

a meadow where at last you could breathe in the fresh air.

There are certain invisible boundaries in our lives.

“So have you found your happiness?” And that phrase has lost none of its kindness or mystery.

I was never really myself when I wasn’t running away.

Our having met, when I think about it now, seems like the meeting of two people who were completely without moorings in life. I think that we were both alone in the world.

She hoped to discover some meaning to life within them, whereas it was the sound of the words and the music of the sentences that captivated me.

“Of course not, Roland, it’s just a bad dream. People don’t murder trees.”

Et que le cheval fit un écart en arrière. “Donne-lui tout de même à boire,” dit mon père.

Como todos los muertos que se olvidan En un montón de perros apagados

De burgemeester heeft ons iets misdaan, Wij leerden, door zijn schuld, het leven haten.

“The sky is like the torn midway tent of a poor circus in a fishing village in Flanders.”

From that moment forward, there was an absence in my life, a blank space that not only gave me a feeling of emptiness but that I couldn’t bear to look at.