I think I may have stumbled on the secret to happiness … Plus artful delights from a weekend in Cannes et Le Cannet

Last week I took a few days off to go visit a friend in Cannes. On my train ride back home to Toulouse, I spent my time chatting with the guy in the coffee cart (Sure, I have an anglophone’s accent, but if you tell me I sound like Jane Birkin when I speak French, I’ll take it!), staring wistfully out the window at the languid, blue-green landscape, and reading the latest issue of L’Express from back to front.

Why back to front?

I can’t say why, really. This is always how I saw my mom reading magazines and catalogues when I was a kid—back when print still reigned supreme (i.e., it ran at all) and I was inducted into the hobby of magazine-reading via teeny-bopper starter subscriptions like Girls Life and Seventeen. But the habit stuck.

Plus, the artsy stuff is always in the back.

First, I flipped past the closing column by Christophe Donner. (Sorry, dude, I wasn’t that interested this week.) I overlooked the next two pages of advertisements and word puzzles. (I’m terrible at crossword puzzles in English and couldn’t possibly imagine trying them in French (though I would say I’m fairly skilled at Sudoku).)

Then I stumbled on it: this week’s book review on Monique s’évade, by Édouard Louis.

Now, I like to read book reviews, but they’re not always exactly works of literary marvel all on their own. This review, however, gave me pause (and maybe the secret to happiness?).

It wasn’t a review so much as it was a brief interview with the author, who had me rereading his words again and again.

Here’s a scan of part of the page:

Here’s the original quote (highlighted above):

Je vois souvent dans la bourgeoisie des individus qui cultive leur blessure, qui y reviennent sans cesse, notamment en faisant de la psychanalyse, des thérapies collective. Je sais que cela peut aider certaines personnes, mais je me demande aussi à quel point cette culture de sa propre blessure empêche d’en sortir.

And here’s an English translation of that quote (provided by DeepL):

I often see bourgeois individuals who cultivate their wounds, who return to them again and again, particularly through psychoanalysis and group therapy. I know that this can help some people, but I also wonder to what extent this culture of one’s own wound prevents one from getting out of it.

(It’s not a great translation, but my translator (i.e., my husband) isn’t at home right now, so we’ve got to make do with the robots.)

But let’s focus on what the Frenchman is trying to say.

In this interview, he talks about his latest book, in which he details the story of his mother (Monique) who, at age 55, left the alcoholic and all-around rather boorish man she was living with to start a new life for herself in Paris. Louis says (again, via poor translation):

My mother has lived through extremely violent situations in her life, but when she manages to extricate herself from them, the incredible thing is that the trace of this violence suddenly disappears within her. She never maintains the wound.

This is likely a very moving story—one which I’ve yet to read since I only just discovered it a week ago and it’s currently living at the top of my reading list (a rather ephemeral place since I’m constantly finding new subjects that catch my interest). But what spoke to me most immediately were Louis’s words on “bourgeois individuals who cultivate their wounds” and whether or not “this culture of one’s own wound prevents one from getting out of it.”

This was the part where I started staring wistfully out the train window.

I asked myself: Is the secret to happiness just about being able to move on?

What if, instead of

• licking our wounds
• journaling about it ad nauseam
• talking to our therapists
• talking to our moms
• talking to our friends as if they were our therapists or our moms
• and generally living life in a metaphorical fetal position where we render ourselves completely inept and unable to keep going because we are so traumatized, offended, and insulted by one or more major and/or minor event(s) from our past

… what if you just decided to move on?

Ruminating is killing your chance to be happy.

I’m a big ruminator, myself. I’ve spent many sleepless nights reliving old memories, playing coulda-shoulda-woulda; going on long, aimless walks alone; and scribbling in my journal like the whacked-out girl from Gone Girl.

Or I should say: I WAS a big ruminator. Because I got tired of all those sleepless nights reliving old memories; my feet started to hurt from prowling the streets alone looking for answers; and I ran out of ink attempting to decode where it all went wrong in my journal.

I decided I wanted to be happy instead.

It would be very poetic and quotable and Instagram-worthy to follow that line with an uplifting, “So I did.”

But you’re not a child and neither am I, so we know life doesn’t march ahead in such a neat, straight line as that.

What life does do, is go on. You can either decide to move along with it and leave behind the past (however horrendous, joyful, or ripple-causing it might have been) or isolate yourself in your own tower of tortured memories.

I used to do the latter, but I’ve learned that the former is a lot more fun.

Life is sad, and it will hurt you and disappoint you. But you’ll hurt yourself more by choosing to live in that hurt forever.

Or you can do as this Frenchman suggests: Let the wounds heal, the scars fade, and keep on living.

In lighter news, let’s look at some French art together:

Before landing on the article about Édouard Louis, I also read: Ann Temkin : « L’Atelier rouge a conduit Matisse vers l’imprévu » (Ann Temkin: “‘L’Atelier rouge’ led Matisse into the unexpected”).

If you’re into art (or not into art but you at least know the name Matisse (like me)), then this might be an interesting one for you. I was a little gobsmacked by the aggressively red paintings from Matisse that in my very uneducated opinion look very un-Matisse-like:

All of the above was discovered on my tiny little siège westbound to Toulouse. So what did I actually see in Cannes and Le Cannet (besides the secret to happiness)?

Well, on one walk (that was neither aimless nor lonely) I found this mural, Le Mur des Amoureux de Peynets, or Peynet’s Lovers’ Wall.

According to the sign (pictured above):

This fresco was painted jointly with Guy CEPPA in 1990 and i[t] represents a metaphor of love, symbolized by a bride and groom flying over the Garden of Eden, inspired by the village of Le Cannet. Raymond PEYNET, a citizen of honor of Le Cannet, painted this scene in honor of all young brides and grooms, to whom he offered a poetic interlude in their honeymoon. It was in 1942, in front of the bandstand in Valence that Raymond Peynet dreamt up his famous couple. In homage to lovers, his friend Georges Brassens wrote the famous song, “Bancs Publics.

A pretty enchanting sight to see while wandering around your friend’s neighborhood, no?