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

I’ve always believed that certain places are like magnets and draw you towards them should you happen to walk within their radius.

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.

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.

the Rive Droite.

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.

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.

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.

was certain the anxiety and the feeling of emptiness that often came over me in the street would never return.

Yes, that bookstore wasn’t only a refuge; it was also a step in my life. I would often stay there until closing time. There was a chair next to the shelves, or rather a tall step stool where I would sit as I leafed through different books.

Later I revisited that same intoxication every time I broke off all ties with someone. I was never really myself when I wasn’t running away. My only happy memories are memories of flight and escape. But life always regained the upper hand.

I advanced with that feeling of lightness that can sometimes come to you in a dream. You no longer fear a thing in the world, potential dangers seem laughable. If something goes really wrong, you just need to wake yourself up. You’re invincible.

I walked on, impatient to reach the end where there was nothing but blue sky and the void. What word would have best described my state of mind? Intoxication? Ecstasy? Rapture? In any case, that road was familiar to me. I felt as if I had walked it before. Soon I would reach the cliff’s edge and I would throw myself into the void. What happiness it would be to float through the air and finally know the feeling of weightlessness I had been searching for my whole life. I can still remember that morning with such clarity, that street and that sky at its end.

And then life went on, with its u...

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.

The Eternal Return.

There was a series of transitional zones in Paris, no-man’s-lands where we were on the border of everything else, in transit, or even held suspended. Within, we benefited from a certain kind of immunity. I might have called them free zones, but neutral zones was more precise.

In those days, she was still in that period of her life when youth is more resilient than all else.

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.

She wanted to escape, to run farther and farther away, to break violently with her everyday life, to finally be able to breathe. And then there were also the panic attacks, from time to time, at the thought that those shadowy figures you had left behind might find you and ask you to account for yourself. It was necessary to hide in order to avoid these blackmailers, hoping that one day you would be beyond their reach, once and for all.

No better way to make ghosts dissipate than to look them right in the eye.

When we really love someone, we’ve got to accept their role in the mystery. And that’s why we love them.

Once I arrived, it would be the Eternal Return. The same routine as always to get the key to your room from the front desk. The same steep stairwell. The same white door with its number: 11. The same anticipation. And then the same lips, the same scent, your hair cascading down the same way.

The horizon lay straight out ahead of us, way out there, towards infinity.

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. All of that blank space blinded me with a bright and radiant light. And it will be like that until the very end.