Ennemonde:

Journeys are not undertakenlightly in the High Country. Farms may be five or ten milesfrom their nearest neighbor. Often it would be one solitary mantraveling those miles to see another solitary man; he never doesthis even once in his life. Or else it’d be a whole tribe of adults,children, and old people setting off toward another whole tribeof adults, children, old people – to see what? Women demolishedby repeated pregnancies, red-facedmen, and crooked old folks(and children too) – only to be looked down on by them? Thehell with that. If anyone wants to show themselves, they’ll do it atthe markets. Twenty, twenty-fivemiles separate the villages thatneatly line the circuit formed by the road.In the surrounding country there are beech trees, chestnuts,sessile oaks – beeches that grow more massive the farther outyou go, sessiles that are ever more ancient; far removed from anydealings with men, there are families of birches that are lovelyin summer and that disappear, white against white, in the snow.On the moors there’s lavender, broom, esparto, sedge, dandelion,and then rocks, rounded rocks, as if long ago, up in theseheights, great rivers used to pass through; then finally, in thegreat open spaces are flat rocks, resonant as bells, that repeat theslightest sound – the hop of a cricket, the patter of a mouse, theslithering of an adder, or the wind glancing off these terrestrialspringboards.The sky is often black, or at least dark blue, though giving theimpression black would give – except during the blooming ofthe wild mignonette, whose exquisite scent is so joyful it dispelsall melancholy. The time of the mignonette aside, fine weatheris not cheerful in these parts; nor is it sad, it’s something else;those who find it to their liking can no longer do without it. Badweather is thoroughly seductive too, immediately assuming as itdoes a cosmic air. There’s something galactic, extra-galacticeven,in the way it behaves. It cannot rain here the way it does elsewhere– you sense that God personally sees to it; here the windmatter-of-factlytakes the fate of the world in hand. The stormadapts its ways here: it doesn’t flash, doesn’t make any noise; simply,metallic objects begin to gleam – belt buckles, lace hooks onshoes, clasps, eyeglasses, bracelets, rings, chains. . . ; you have tomind how you go. You often find twenty, even thirty magnificentbeeches struck by lightning all in a row, dead from head to foot,burned to a cinder, upright, black, bearing witness to the factthat things happen in that silence.Dusk is more often green than red, and goes on for a verylong time – so long that in the end you can’t help noticing thatnight has fallen and that now the light is coming from the stars.In these parts the stars light your way; they’re bright enough forpeople to recognize each other when their paths cross. It may bethat you see more stars here than elsewhere; in any case, they’recertainly larger, for there’s something about the air – whetherits purity, which is exceptional, renders the constellations morevivid or whether, as some claim, it contains some substancethat acts like a magnifying glass. Naturally, no one’s going toboast about having been way out in the open in the depths ofnight. Whenever they see it coming on, people skedaddle homebefore it arrives. There’s a way of behaving toward this land thatwas perfected by our ancestors and that has produced excellentresults; indeed, it’s the only way: you shape yourself to it. Everyaccident that’s been seen to happen here – and they’re countlessin number, including many that are strange indeed – comes fromsome infringement of these sorts of rules or laws.There’s nothing more straightforward for example than goingfrom Villesèche to the Pas de Redortier in daylight; it’ll take youan hour at most. The landscape isn’t exactly cheerful, but it’sdoable; all it needs is a bit of will, or passion (if it’s for hunting),or foolishness (if it’s for no reason). But on a day when theclouds are low and dense, and night falls, try then! No one willchance it.The tool that people around here have most often in theirhand is a shotgun, whether it’s for hunting or for, let’s say, philosophicalreflection; in either case, there’s no solution withouta shot being fired. The gun hangs from the stem of a wineglassthat’s been embedded in the wall near the chair where the manof the house sits. Whether this chair is at the table or by thefireplace, the shotgun is always within arm’s reach. It’s not thatthe region is unsafe because of a lack of police; on the contrary,even in the heyday of banditry there was never any crime uphere, except for one incident in 1928, and that one was preciselyabout what everyone is afraid of. Everyone is afraid of loneliness.Families are no solution: at most they’re collections of lonesomepeople who in reality are each heading in their own direction.Families don’t come together around someone; they separate asthey move away from someone. Then there’s metaphysics – andnot the Sorbonne kind, rather the sort you have to bear in mindin confronting irredeemable solitude and the outside world.Monsieur Sartre would not be of much use here; a shotgun, onthe other hand, comes in handy in many situations.It might seem surprising that these peasants don’t grasp thehandles of a plow. The reason is that the peasants are shepherds.That’s also what keeps them beyond (and above) technologicalprogress. No one has yet invented a machine for mindingsheep. The father, head of the family, oversees the flock; the sonor sons are in charge of the small farm that in fact functions as aclosed economy. People only till the acreage necessary for enoughwheat, barley, potatoes, and vegetables to meet the needs of thefamily or the individual, and that is why so many of the peasantsremain unmarried, living alone: in this way they have need of solittle that they spend no more than one month a year scrapingthe earth.