A thousand years before or a thousand years after

“Once I fell asleep on the motorway between Marseille and Lyon. Those lines going past… I dropped off for a moment and woke up because the car had hit that thing on the left that separates the two carriageways. I gripped the wheel, trying to keep my eyes open. And I saw —it wasn’t an idea, or a mirage— it was really as if I were seeing that place a thousand years before or a thousand years after. That strip of asphalt, of tar, all cracked and split open, overgrown with grass, like the remains of an ancient civilisation. Useless, in ruins… the Parthenon, the pyramids, the motorway, the factories, all the same. On that strip, men, women, tramps, a sack tied to a stick over one shoulder, walking, like at the end of the Charlie Chaplin films. But they weren’t going anywhere, it was all over, they were leaving. And I told myself it wouldn’t be long, that soon it would all be finished. The housing estates, the cars, the cinemas. Perhaps someone very old would still remember, and would tell the young that there had once been cinemas, that they were images that moved, that spoke. And the young wouldn’t understand.”

“It’s something, how much you still believe in man.”

(Dialogue between Alexandre and Marie in the film La maman et la putain –The Mother and the Whore– by Jean Eustache, 1973. Translated from the Spanish subtitles, not from the French original.)