Michael Wood · A Little Bit of Real Life: Writing with Godard

Michael Wood · A Little Bit of Real Life: Writing with Godard

“Proust and Godard, in Anna Shechtman’s words, become ‘the memory-writers of their respective generations’. Paul Valéry, to Ludovic Cortade, seems to have been eavesdropping on conversations in the Cahiers office when he asks (in 1928): ‘What should we be without the help of that which does not exist?’ And we may all be writing along with Godard when he asks Anne-Marie Miéville to read the following phrases from Charles Péguy’s Clio, evoked for us by Daniel Fairfax and subtitled ‘dialogue between history and the pagan soul’:

‘I need a day to write the history of a second. I need a year to write the history of a minute. I need a lifetime to write the history of an hour. I need an eternity to write the history of a day. One can do everything, except the history of what one does.’”

_{May 13, 2024 at 06:16PM}