25 years ago, I didn’t take pictures yet, nor did I write
down any impressions. But it was a project
of the imagination all the same: travelling across Europe by train, visiting harbour
cities. I had never sailed, never been aboard a ship (except the ferry to
Dover, in pre-Eurostar days) but somehow I’d picked up a longing for seafaring
cities. Of course, the trip mainly taught
me that European harbours are busy industrial-commercial places with little
romance attached.
Nowhere more so than in Brest, with its huge industrial and military harbour complexes. Its
sheer vastness, with a certain emptiness, a certain whiteness, a certain
in-hospitability … I remember walking for miles & miles along broad winding
& climbing roads – seeing the dock yards below, with no-entry signs everywhere.
And yet – such is the mystery of places &
souls - “Brest”, for me, to this day, encapsulates
all the breezy allure of “le grand large” combined with the urban
trappings of transit, a certain seediness so indulgent of aimless
wanderers.
But frankly, I hardly ever think about Brest anymore, and these
days my main escape route to le grand large,
is boarding a train for Antwerp, to go and greet the river Scheldt.
On one such Antwerp escapade, entering a local second hand
bookshop, I was startled and intrigued to see there on display a little booklet
titled “Un amour de Brest”.
Leafing through it, I almost gasped - ah, those pictures – catching both the breezy
whiteness of the docks and the colourful bustle of a harbour city.
The book’s previous owner-reader had visibly been
moved, too, leaving a loving trail of sentences underlined in blue ink. I could have cried with recognition, reading one
such marked phrase: “et puis, un jour, tu débarques à Brest” – “and one day one alights at Brest”. Ach, 25 years after my own debarking at Brest, to
find this little book, as an unexpected gift with words & pictures
sanctioning my intuitions of so many years ago.
At the counter, the shop assistant looked appreciatively at
the little book. “Are you happy with your
find? I didn’t know them at all, neither the writer, nor the illustrator. The pictures are beautiful, aren’t they?”
At a certain age, one grows weary of one’s own inarticulate longings
and illusions. Knowing that the world is just what it is, one has tired of
looking & longing for something that simply isn’t there. One wisely discounts the imagination, mindful
not to overreach reality.
But then, all the more, what a relief, what a gift – when a
melody, a picture, a happy phrase in a book captures such a longing, creates
beauty with it, turns a figment of the imagination into a tangible reality
which can be shared with others.
One is
less alone with one’s idiosyncratic longings than one has been trained to think.
Somewhere out there, there’s a sympathetic companion-book, even if it takes 25
years to find it.
Bibliographic Note:
"Un amour de Brest
– Qu’est-ce qu’elle a, ma ville?" Par Hervé
Hamon (Récit) et Anne Smith (Dessins et peintures) (dialogues éditeur – 2008)
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