The seriousness of money ( glamourised people):

The other day while at a friend’s place I saw bits of a television series which is about a group of highly trained forensic policemen. I think it wasn’t “The Experts” but one of its imitations. The story had that lighting particular to American series and some of their films, a kind of glossiness with a lot of steely blues in the interior scenes. It also had that tensely glamorous atmosphere, with policewomen with something too pert and too smart about them, and the men looking like spinoffs of George Clooney or Brad Pitt. Everyone moves with a sort of crispness , no one ever fumbles, never hesitates. The computer guy sits on the computer and with a few keystrokes , enters into the Pentagon’s secret database or some other inaccessible place. It takes him a few tries to guess the bad guy’s password.

I don’t watch much of that kind of movie, but I am conscious that this taut ubersmart look is very much in fashion nowadays. Two years ago we were served with “Mr and Mrs Smith” which was so drenched in glamour that it wasn’t an action movie anymore as much as a sort of religious work, a Mystery play of style.

A profound gravity characterises people who are soaked in that “glamour liquid”, they are rigid like the faces of old emperors whose corpses have been preserved in lacquer. When I go to parties, I sometimes come across young people working in corporate positions in big companies. They also give off that impression of almost supernatural seriousness about themselves, as if, while tolerating the company of mere mortals around them, their minds were elsewhere, attuned to the higher spheres of creation, in touch with the innermost cycles of money. Their shades are sacramental masks, behind which their eyes, turned inwards, gaze at inner vaults laden with gold and pearls of great price.

In “Voyage au bout de la nuit”, Celine remarked on the sacred character of the banks he saw in New York, cathedral like buildings where business was conducted in reverential silence.

Maybe humanity has never been so serious as it is nowadays. It’s hard to know, for these are things about which we have pretty little information regarding how it was, in the past. The demands we make on today’s children would probably have surprised our ancestors. We certainly ask too much of today’s women – perfect bodies, success at work, perfect housekeeping, perfect mothers. The pressure is getting harder on men, too – perfect husbands, attentive, yet winners at work too.

I love America, but for once I’ll say it: the Americans are the main culprits in this frenzy for overachievement, overglamourisation. In the 19th century, Americans were already considered a deadly serious people. A nation of immigrants, hell bent on self improvement, on making it to the top. Historians are amazed at the thoroughness with which the Civil War was conducted, the Yankee armies methodically laying to waste every Southern city they came upon, the battles fought with extraordinary rates of casualties, for the times.

American humour has a random quality to it, the kind of jokes one expects from people who work too much, and start laughing at anything in an exhausted relaxation of the nerves. Woody Allen’s humour doesn’t count as American, it is quintessencial Jewish humour, of an old, old people, who have been through everything and expect the worst as part of life.

One can only hope that this madness of self-seriousness, self-worship will not take hold in the human brain. Our species has not gone through all that it has gone through, to end up becoming a bunch of hyperneat overachievers, with trembling hands and a jar of sleeping pills on the bedside table.

That would be really sad, especially now that science has given us the means to really enjoy life on this planet. Personnally, I feel that we have enough science as it is, and that it is dangerous, even madness to embark in more research in fields such as genetics. We should rather use the knowledge we have to make the world a garden, a place where people live good, simple lives . It may seem naïve, but the poignant thing is that it is actually possible . A remote possibility, but one which exists, unlike the never-never land of communism. But unfortunately, with this craze for more and more things, all them sleek and glossy, and with people themselves becoming sleeker and glossier, as if they also started to become like the products they own, we are going far from the idea of the world as a garden ( and closer and closer to the world becoming one big airport, with its sanitised atmosphere, its duty free shops, its dull people reading dull magazines, its deadly seriousness).