The sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin, Research Director Emeritus at the CNRS and honorary doctorate from many universities around the world, has just published Réveillons-nous (Denoël, 80 pages, 12 euros). At 101, the complexity theorist looks back on a century of life, interspersed with war and resistance, communism, brotherhood and love, research and writing, but also death, experienced as a child, d an infinitely loved mother.
I wouldn’t have come here if…
… my mother, whom I adored, had not died when I was 10 years old. His heart stopped when a train arrived at Gare Saint-Lazare and they didn’t tell me. My Uncle Joseph picked me up from school and explained that my parents had gone away for treatment. On the day of the funeral, my father came to see me, dressed all in black. When I saw it, I understood. He told me again that my mother was away. I knew they were lies and locked myself in the closet to cry. Then my aunt Corine, my mother’s sister, said to me: “From now on I am your mother. Which seemed like a usurpation to me. I not only experienced the death of my mother, but also the breakup with beings I loved, my father and my aunt. It was absolute loneliness.
What memories do you have of your mother?
She had a heart lesion and was not supposed to have children. She tried to abort me, but I persevered. I was an only child. My mother was even more attached to me because she couldn’t have other children. I have intense and vague memories of her. She would take me to the tea room at Galeries Lafayette or to her seamstress to sew little sailor suits for me. I didn’t want to go to school, I wanted to stay with her. Once, during an excursion, she fainted near Lake Gérardmer in the Vosges. I remember my panic. But I forgot the sound of his voice. My mother’s name was Luna. I have long identified her with the moon, with the goddess Astarté to whom Salammbô prays, and worshiped her on every full moon. Even today, in moments of sadness, his memory comes back. I never recovered from his death. And all my life I’ve dreamed of her.
What did these dreams say?
I remember one of them very vividly in 1969. I was living in California where the Salk Institute had invited me. I had invited my father and aunt to join me – he had eventually married her after the death of my uncle Joseph, who had been deported to Auschwitz. The day before they arrive, I dream that I’m at the bottom of a hill and that a bus appears at the top. Dozens of people get out and approach me. Suddenly I see my mother among them. We run towards each other and we kiss. Then she said to me: “I can’t stay, I have to take the train. I wake up in tears. But right after that I’m relieved because I finally got to say goodbye to him.
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