'Look for the Ridiculous in Everything'

“Thirty years old today, and all around me I feel the waters of melancholy recede.

“Thirty years old! Now I’m convinced I shall not escape death.”

 

Two statements written by the same man on the same day and, according to popular understanding, utterly contradictory. Awareness of our mortality makes us pensive if not clinically depressed. But that doesn’t take into account the roughhewn, commonsensical genius of Jules Renard. He is writing in his Journal on February 22, 1894, with a peasant’s pragmatism and the gift of dry irony. He has just turned age thirty and two-thirds of his life has already passed; though, of course, he doesn't know that. On February 22, 1904, he writes:

 

“Forty years old! For the sage, death is perhaps merely the passage from one day to the next. He dies as others turn forty.”

 

Renard here is cagier. Does he deem himself a sage? He seems never have taken himself too seriously – a rare and essential virtue. He never whines. Here, just two years later:

 

“Forty-two years old. What have I done? Next to nothing, and now I do nothing at all.

 

“I have less talent, money health, fewer readers, fewer friends, but more resignation.

 

“Death appears to me as a wide lake that I am approaching, whose outlines I begin to make out.

 

“Am I any better a person? Not much. I have less energy to do wrong.”

 

A minor sinner’s self-assessment. Not bad enough to be evil nor good enough to be a saint. Pride in both directions kept within uneasy boundaries. The entry for February 22, 1908:

 

“Forty-four is when you begin to give up hope of doubling before quitting.

 

“I feel old, but would not wish to be younger by as much as five minutes.”

 

Signs of genuine, hard-earned maturity. The opposite of Yeats and his monkey glands or the male Boomer with a gray ponytail and Grateful Dead tattoos. Finally, the Journal entry from February 22, 1910:

 

“Forty-six today. How much longer do I have? Until the autumn?”  

 

He didn’t make it. Renard was born on February 22, 1864, and died on May 22, 1910, of arteriosclerosis – a condition readily treatable today -- at age forty-six. As he wrote in his Journal on February 17, 1890, “Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.”

 

[All quoted passages are taken from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]