The Years

by Annie Ernaux

The wars in the world followed their due course. Our interest in them was inversely proportional to their duration and the distance from where we lived.

People grew discouraged—too many poor—and irritated at their own powerlessness—how can you give to everyone?—and found relief in quickening their pace in Métro corridors when passing recumbent bodies, whose utter lack of movement served as obstacles to their purposeful advance.

With pleasure or annoyance, lightness of heart or deep despondency, depending on the day, more and more, the acquisition of things (which we later said we couldn’t do without), was life’s magnetic north.

People said: “In time, everyone will use the computer.” But we did not intend to have one. It was the first object to which we’d ever felt inferior. We left its mastery to others, and envied them for it.

Goods marked with bar codes slipped more quickly than ever from conveyor belt to shopping cart. A discreet beep conjured away the transaction’s cost in an instant. Back-to-school supplies filled the shelves before children had started their summer holidays, Christmas toys appeared on the shelves the day after All Saints’ Day, swimsuits in February. The timing of things pulled us into its vortex and forced us to live two months ahead of ourselves.

And we, high and mighty despisers of consumer society, yielded to the yearning for a pair of boots which, like the long-ago sunglasses, miniskirt, and bell-bottoms, created a brief illusion of renewal. More than a sense of possession it was this feeling people sought on the shelves of Zara and H&M, instantly granted upon acquiring a thing, a little shot of extra being.

Certainly, as at other times with her sons, when she takes on the mothering role she assumes only occasionally, she feels the limitations of the maternal bond, her need to have a lover, a kind of intimacy that only the sex act can provide, which also consoles her in times of passing conflict with her sons.

The twentieth century closed behind us in a pitiless succession of end-of-millennium reviews. Everything was listed, classified, and assessed, from works of art and literature to wars and ideologies, as if the twenty-first century could only be entered with our memories wiped clean.

Everything in existence, air, heat, cold, grass, ants, sweat, and snoring, generated merchandise and products for the upkeep of the latter, ad infinitum, in an unrelenting subdivision of reality and proliferation of objects. The commercial imagination knew no bounds.

It was normal for goods to arrive from all over the world and freely circulate, while men and women were turned away at the borders. To cross them, some had themselves locked into trucks, inert merchandise, and died asphyxiated when the driver forgot them in a Dover parking lot under the June sun.

They finally came around to the great subject of conversation, the media, its manipulation of public opinion and the ways of getting around it. None could be believed but YouTube, Wikipedia, Rezo.net, Acrimed on the web. The critique of media mattered more than the information itself.

By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.