Souvenirs, souvenirs ...

 

Renault 4 'chevaux' crank start 

This was 50/60 years ago. No cellphone, no internet, no supermarket, no motorway ... But radio, B&W TV, land-lines phones with a dial ... I remember my father and I coming out at eight in the morning, still dark, with a yellowish lightning of a street lamp at some distance, entering the car and ... no start. Then, after ten or fifteen revolutions, the engine starts. Winter time of course. Then dropping me at school and going to work until seven pm. This was 1964.

The "Renault Four Horses" was the first car I knew, and the 'Solex' the first motorized two wheeler I drove. After the Renault 4, my father bought a Renault 16 that was already a modern car. 1971. Colour TV, first supermarkets, washing machines, in less than ten years, life was changing. And it went on, faster and faster. So did life. Do we live better ? I'm afraid we don't. I am from the last generation that have known another world, a better world. 

In my opinion, society achieved its peak culturally from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th. There won't be anymore Alexandre Dumas, Walter Scott, Fennimore Cooper to tell us how beautiful is the world, the natural world, how unique and deep are the people we happen to be, the natural human beings, how bright and happy ought to be our future when extrapolating the social progresses already made. Cops, priests and judges were respected, rightly so. People in the street didn't hesitate to salute one another and stop to chat a little about some news. Neighbors were helping one another when needed. Children were chewing licorice sticks, you know, that yellow wood while playing in the street shooting marbles along the gutters. 

There still were salmons in the rivers of Brittany and Great Britain. This was the world that, in the movie Brazil, Sam and Jill saw far away and tried to reach. Brazil that came out in 1985 was a final warning to where we were heading to, just as 1984 was a written one in 1949. We cannot say we did not know, but we did nothing. We swallowed altogether every progress and each despotic rules that came along. We wanted too much, too fast, no matter what. The engine of that rushing ahead can be traced to many causes and one in particular can be traced to a flaw in our mind: Arrogance, being more than we are.

There is a fight, a terrible fight in a man's life when he becomes a teen: Arrogance vs Innocence. Arrogance always win. To mankind's greatest evil. 

There I was sitting but most often standing in the middle behind the front seats

(Yes, it was a green one)

Me on the 'Solex' of my father's friend pictured below with my mother on the other side

the Renault 16