Published at 1:19 am. Updated at 9:00 a.m.
Émilie Bibeau Special collaboration
As a teenager, I remember being deeply influenced by, among other things, the pizza attempt at McDonald’s, the mystery surrounding Mariah Carey’s voice lifting a garage door, and the 1993 Stanley Cup… But also everything that was more intense and bigger than just my life.
It was a time when emotions of all kinds multiplied throughout my emerging adult life. And among those emotions: the great novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
Having grown up in the suburbs of Quebec, where there was none of the mysteries and obscure wonders of the Yorkshire moors, and despite a happy and peaceful childhood, I was intrigued by the beginning of the book, when it spoke of “a place so completely remote Place” spoke of the river of the world” where a heart-rending passion was lived… And where that life, as Aragon wrote, “will have passed away like a great sad castle, with all the winds passing by.”
I had underestimated and never felt so strongly what the universe of wind imposes on a vast and barren landscape until I recently went to the Îles-de-la-Madeleine for a photo shoot, where the atmospheric weather took me back to the heart of Wuthering Heights. Above all, in what this writing had once taught me intellectually, and in the memory it revived, this time physically.
It was May, in a landscape as magnificent as it was enigmatic, and the wind, the rain, the cold, which did not let up, put me in a constant physical struggle that, at first, we must admit, taught me humility.
Cheeks numb from the cold, windswept, hair constantly disheveled, indomitable, so strong I could almost feel my own body flying away. I swear I’m not exaggerating!
I couldn’t help but be disturbed by his intensity. To console myself, I had the reflex to give this harsh wind an inspiring meaning: it would inevitably bring me renewal, make me proud and resilient like the great red cliffs that border the sea!
Like everyone else, I needed a purpose: we need the sea to “wash us from our problems,” the sun to “warm our hearts,” the wind to “drive out evil”…
I needed him to bring good news, say profound things, or otherwise reassure me!
In short, on the islands the wind was present in all discussions between the film crew and the locals, and as Alain Corbin writes in his book The Gust and the Zéphyr: “We wish it, we beg it, or we.” insults him. It is a regretted presence or absence. Sometimes when it stops there is a feeling of absence. He who filled a void with his breath then makes us feel the silence imposed by his interruption. »
It’s all there, the great story of humanity: we don’t want it anymore, then we miss it.
The wind that makes us feel free is also the one that makes us frightened and the one who does good is the same one who destroys: “The wind that is good is the same that tears away” and “I promise, I promise that the day that comes is brand new,” sing Avec pas d’ helmet. A refrain I shouted myself in my car while my hair blew in the wind and hope filled my heart…
Faced with the squalls that unleashed the sea, alone with myself, the wind also taught me that the void almost no longer exists, that it has been colonized.
He taught me that, faced with this emptiness, people are always looking for exercise and that they will do anything to get it: “It is in vain to say that people should be content with rest; They need action and if they can’t find it, they will create it,” said Charlotte Brontë, Emily’s sister. We have an instinctive need for life to be non-trivial, to be bigger and more extraordinary than us.
The French poet Leconte de Lisle wrote: “The terrible winds are here, land winds, driven by a force that is revenge and punishment, sometimes the bearers of terror, injustice, misfortune,” and he taught me the winds within…
This is perhaps the most important point: he showed me that hate begets hate and that there is no end to it… Just like in Wuthering Heights, where no law is bowed, the true wind that blows, that of vengeance, is hate , who inhabits Heathcliff’s heart.
And he’s the one who screams and blows the loudest.
Because he will always be there again, Ultimately, I can only hope that our collective wind will no longer be the one that blows the strongest, often bringing with it hate and destruction, but, on the contrary, will be the one that reveals the greatest thing about our openness to life and others. May it be the bearer of positive puzzles and liberating worlds where we all sing together like Bob Dylan in answer to our questions: “The answer, my friend, blows in the wind…”
I finish writing and in the quiet of the living room my stepchildren are watching a film by Hayao Miyazaki with shells in their hands and this sentence by Paul Valéry resonates: “The wind is rising!… We must try to live!” »
In fact, we must try to live.
What a fight.
What luck.