You know, I was looking at the stack of research
we have for today, and it feels a bit like we're
looking at three different people, maybe four.
It really does feel that way. It's almost disjointed,
isn't it? I mean, looking at the biography here.
On one page, you've got a guy hanging out in
1960s Paris, smoking cigarettes, wearing the
trench coat, talking philosophy with Michel Foucault.
Oh, yeah. Very chic, very intellectual. The kind
of guy you'd be intimidated to talk to at a party.
The absolute epitome of the French cool kid,
the enfant terrible. Right. But then you flip
the page and the same guy is living in a jungle
in Panama, sleeping in a hammock. eating insects
and completely cut off from the Western world
for four years. For four years. And apparently
he liked that version of his life better. Much
better by his own admission. Yeah. And then just
to confuse things further, you have the third
guy, the Nobel Prize winner, the immortal of
the French Academy, the guy giving lectures in
Stockholm in a tuxedo. It's just it's hard to
reconcile that these are all the same person.
J .M .G. Leglazio. It is hard, and that's what
makes him such a nightmare to categorize for
critics, but an absolute dream for us to study.
Exactly. The Swedish Academy, the folks who gave
him the Nobel, they had this line in their citation
that I just love. I think it frames everything
we're going to talk about today. What was it?
They called him an explorer of a humanity beyond
and below the reigning civilization. Wow. Beyond
and below. That is heavy. It gives you chills,
doesn't it? It implies that the world we live
in, the skyscrapers, the stock markets, the podcasts,
the elections, that's just the surface. Yeah.
That is the reigning civilization. But Leclesio
spent his life trying to pry up the floorboards
to see what was underneath. So that is the mission
for this deep dive. We aren't just doing a standard
biography. We're trying to figure out how you
go from being an experimental French hipster,
you know, this intellectual darling. Right. To
becoming a voice for indigenous tribes and the
environment. Honestly, I want to understand the
sensual ecstasy thing the Nobel Committee talked
about, because that sounds, well, it sounds promising.
It's a fascinating concept. And to get there,
we have to look at everything. We've got his
books, his interviews and some truly wild stories
about his childhood that explain why he never
quite felt at home in Europe. OK, so where do
we start? The beginning seems obvious, but with
him, even that is complicated. Let's start with
the passports. Because the confusion starts right
at birth. It really does. So JMG, Le Clécier
Jean -Marie Gustave, was born on April 13th,
1940. Now, context is everything here. He's born
in Nice, France. A French Riviera. Beautiful.
Beautiful, but not in 1940. This is World War
II. France is under occupation. It's a time of
shortages, fear, and chaos. Not exactly a vacation
spot. No. But while he is physically born in
France, his heritage is already pulling him in
completely different directions. Because his
father wasn't even there. No, not at all. His
father was a surgeon in the British Army. So
at the very moment Leclésio was taking his first
breath in Nice, his father was stationed in Nigeria.
So right from day one, there is this massive
separation. The father figure represents authority,
the British Empire, and this distant, exotic
land of Africa. And the mother is there in war
-torn France. It's this perfect split, and it
gets even more complicated. But then there is
the Mauritian connection. This is the part of
the notes I had to read twice. He has three nationalities,
French, British, and Mauritian. And he calls
Mauritius his little fatherland. But he barely
lived there. He never lived there for more than
a few months at a time. And that paradox is the
key to his soul, I think. To understand why he
claims Mauritius so strongly, we have to go back
in time. We have to go back to the 18th century.
Ah, the ancestor story. The ancestor story. This
is family legend, but it's foundational. His
ancestor, a man named Francois Alexis Leclisio,
was living in Brittany, France during the French
Revolution. Okay, so heads are rolling. The guillotine
is busy. A pretty tense time to be alive. Exactly.
The Revolutionary Army, the Jacobins, they are
demanding total loyalty. And they demand that
Francois enlist in the army. But they have a
requirement, a very specific requirement. He
has to cut his hair. A hair cut. The Revolutionary
cut. Short hair. It was a symbol of breaking
away from the old aristocratic styles, the wigs,
the long hair of the ancient regime. And he refused.
You refused. I have to stop you there. He fled
the country. He became an exile. Because he didn't
want a haircut. That seems a little dramatic,
doesn't it? I mean, hair grows back. It sounds
incredibly petty to us now, sure. But think about
the context. In a totalitarian environment, which
the terror effectively was, the body is the last
thing you own. Ah, okay. If the state can tell
you how to wear your hair, they own you. His
refusal wasn't just vanity. It was a profound
act of political defiance. He basically said,
my body is my own. And he got on a boat with
his family to escape. That is a serious commitment
to personal liberty. Where was he treated to
go? He intended to go to India. That was the
plan. But the boat stopped in Mauritius, which
is this island in the Indian Ocean. And for whatever
reason, maybe they were tired of the sea, maybe
they liked the look of the place, they got off,
and they stayed. And that accident of history,
getting off the boat one stop early, created
this weird hybrid identity for the Leclasio family.
Because Mauritius isn't exactly French, right?
Well, it was a French colony, but shortly after
they arrived, the British took it over during
the Napoleonic Wars. But here is the loophole
that created Le Glacier's world. The British,
in the Surrender Treaty, allowed the French settlers
to keep their language, their religion, and their
customs. So you have a time capsule. Precisely.
You have this community of white French settlers,
the Franco -Mauritians, living on a British -ruled
island off the coast of Africa, speaking 18th
century French and holding onto customs that
were disappearing back in Europe. It's like a
cultural bubble. A bubble, exactly. And so Leclasier
grows up hearing these stories. Even though he's
in France, his parents talk about this island
like it's the Garden of Eden. It's this lost
paradise. So he grows up feeling like an exile.
He feels that his real home isn't the concrete
and rain of Europe. It's this mythical island
he's never even really seen. He calls it his
little fatherland. It's a place of memory, not
geography. And that's a theme that just runs
through his entire life's work. The search for
a home that maybe doesn't even exist on a map.
That sense of being an outsider must have been
amplified by his childhood. We mentioned the
war. But after the war, something huge happens.
This is the event that made him a writer. I truly
believe that. In 1948, when he is eight years
old, he, his mother, and his brother get on a
ship. They're finally going to join his father
in Nigeria. Imagine that for an eight -year -old
boy. You've grown up in a small village in the
mountains behind Nice Roke Billiard. You've seen
war, sure, but your world is still very small.
And suddenly you're on a boat for weeks heading
to West Africa. It was a massive cultural shock.
He wrote about this extensively later in his
life, particularly in his book Lafrican, The
African. He describes the journey as passing
through a looking glass. Through a looking glass.
I like that. He leaves the gray contained sort
of rationed world of post -war Europe and enters
a world of intense light, heat, storms, and just
vastness. And he's meeting his father. essentially
for the first time. He would have been, what,
an infant when his father left? Right. He hadn't
seen his father since he was a baby. So in his
head, his father is this hero, this distant god,
this myth. But the reality, the reality was a
bit different. The notes say his father was strict.
Strict, mildly. His father was a British army
surgeon who had spent years in the bush alone.
He was rigid. He was colonial. He was authoritarian.
So not a warm and fuzzy reunion. Not at all.
He believed in discipline. So Leclisio goes from
this free -roaming life with his mother to suddenly
having this stern man measuring out his food
and telling him how to behave. It was a shock.
That dynamic is fascinating. You have the freedom
of the African landscape, the jungle, the insects,
the sheer vitality of Nigeria clashing with the
rigidity of the father figure inside the house.
That tension is the engine of his creativity.
It's right there. The conflict between nature
freedom and civilization rules. In Nigeria, the
boy, Lecladzio, found a kind of freedom outside
the house that he never had in France. What did
he do? He played with the local children. He
ran through the tall grass. He describes this
incredible feeling of being part of something
bigger. He realized that the world was much bigger
and stranger than what he learned in school.
It seems like that trip planted the seeds for
his lifelong fascination with cultures outside
of Europe. He didn't just see Africa as a scary
place or a place to be conquered. He saw it as
a place that was alive. He saw it as a place
that had its own logic, its own magic. And significantly,
he realized that the European way of doing things,
his father's way, wasn't the only way. It was
just one option and maybe not even the best one.
That's a huge realization for a kid to have.
So he spends his formative time in Nigeria, absorbs
all these sights and sounds, but eventually he
has to come back. He has to grow up, go to university,
become a serious person. And he tries. He really
does. Which brings us to his meteoric rise as
the young rebel. Okay, so this is his Paris phase.
This is the Paris phase. He goes to university
in Bristol for a year, then in Nice. He studies
literature. He's incredibly smart, obviously.
He gets a master's degree. I saw the thesis topic.
Henri Michaud and the mystical experience. Which
is perfect, right? Michaud was a poet who used
drugs and travel to explore the boundaries of
the mind. So Le Clesio is already signaling what
he cares about. He cares about the things that
break the rules of normal reality. He's not writing
his thesis on, you know, Proust or something
predictable. No, he's already looking for the
weird stuff, the edges. And then, in 1963, at
the ripe old age of 23, he drops his debut novel,
Le Procès Verbal. In English, The Interrogation.
And boom, instant superstar. 23 years old. I
was still figuring out how to pay my electric
bill at 23. He publishes a novel and almost wins
the Prix Goncourt, which is like the Pulitzer
and the Booker Prize rolled into one for the
French. He won the Prix Renaud, which is huge.
And the book was The Talk of Paris. Everyone
was talking about this brilliant, strange, young
writer. But let's pause here because I think
we need to explain what kind of book this was.
I've tried to read some of the... Cool French
literature from the 60s, the nouveau Roman stuff.
And I have to be honest, it can be rough. It's
not exactly a beach read. No, definitely not
a beach read. If you bring the interrogation
to the beach, you're going to have a bad time.
You'll probably just stare at the sun and question
your own existence. Which is kind of what the
main character does, right? What was he actually
doing in these books? Because the notes mention
he was obsessed with insanity and... So think
about the time period. This is the 1960s. Structuralism
is huge. Existentialism is still hanging around.
The cool intellectual stance was to deconstruct
everything. Deconstruct everything. OK. The idea
was that traditional storytelling, you know,
once upon a time a hero fell in love and defeated
the villain was a lie. It was a fake structure
we imposed on a chaotic world to make ourselves
feel safe. So they wanted to write the world
as it actually was without the neat little plot.
Right. And they believe the world is chaotic.
fragmented and doesn't have a clear plot. So
Lecletio's early books are trying to capture
that chaos. In the interrogation, the main character,
Adam Palo, is a guy living in an abandoned house.
He might be a deserter from the army. He might
be an escapee from a mental asylum. We never
really find out. So what does he do? What's the
story? He wanders around. He stares at objects.
He tries to kill rats. He follows a dog. He sits
in the sun and tries to figure out if he actually
exists or if he's merging with the landscape.
It's very internal. It sounds intense. It is
intense. It's written with this high voltage,
nervous energy. He's describing the sunlight
on a wall for three pages, but he makes it feel
like a hallucination. It's a book about a mind
falling apart or maybe a mind waking up to a
different kind of reality. And the heavy hitters
loved it. The big name philosophers. Oh, they
adored it. Michel Foucault, the philosopher who
wrote Madness and Civilization, basically said,
this guy gets it. Jules Deleuze praised him.
Le Clésio became the poster child for this very
cerebral, very difficult, very French way of
writing. He was the rebel. He was questioning
the nature of language. He was questioning reality.
He was the angry young man in the black turtleneck.
He fit the part perfectly. But he didn't stay
there. Yeah. And I think that is... The plot
twist of his life. He could have stayed in Paris,
accepted the awards, become a professor at the
Sorbonne, and just kept writing these difficult
books about madness. He could have had a very
comfortable career doing that. But he didn't.
He left. He ran away, essentially. He realized
that the intellectual life in Paris was its own
kind of trap. It was just words about words about
words. He wanted to put things real. He wanted
to get his hands dirty. So he starts moving.
He goes to the U .S. to teach. But then, 1967.
Thailand. This seems like a key moment. All right.
This was his national service. In France, you
have to do military service, but you could do
cooperation instead, basically aid work. So he
gets sent to Thailand. And he gets kicked out
almost immediately. Laughs. He does. And the
reason is so telling. It says everything about
the man he was becoming. Why? What happened?
He didn't get kicked out for being a bad worker
or for being lazy. He got kicked out for protesting
against child prostitution. Wow. OK. That is
a bold move for a young man in a foreign country
on a government assignment. It is, but it shows
that his moral compass was already pointing towards
social justice. He wasn't just there to be a
tourist or an observer. He saw exploitation.
Specifically, the exploitation of children. And
he couldn't keep his mouth shut. He wrote articles.
He complained. And the authorities said, OK,
you're too much trouble. Get out. So even back
then, he was defending the humanity below the
reigning civilization. That's it. Exactly. He
was already doing it long before the Nobel Committee
gave him the award for it. So they boot him from
Thailand. Where do they send him? They transfer
him to Mexico to finish his service. And this
accident of bureaucracy being sent from Thailand
to Mexico changed his life and arguably the course
of French literature. Because this is what leads
to Panama. This is what leads to Panama. And
honestly, this is the part of the story that
blows my mind. We are talking about the Ember
Woonin tribe. Yes. So while he's based in Mexico,
he starts traveling down into Panama. And he
ends up spending four years from 1970 to 1974
living with the Ember Woonin people in the Darien
jungle. Okay, we have to talk about what living
with means here. Because usually when a writer
goes to a remote location, they stay in a hotel,
maybe hire a guide, take some notes and go home
to write. Maybe they stay for a month. This was
not that. Leclezio disappeared. This wasn't a
retreat. This was immersion. The Ember lives
in the deep rainforest. At that time, there were
no roads, no electricity, no running water. The
social structure was completely different. It
was a river -based culture. He lived in their
villages, ate their food, slept in a hammock.
What drove him to do that? Was he running away
from his fame in Paris? I think he was running
towards something. You know, he had spent all
those years in Paris writing about how civilization
is a trap and language is a prison, but it was
all theoretical. Right, he was writing it from
a cafe. He was writing about madness from a comfortable
apartment. In Panama, he wanted to see if there
was another way to be human. He wanted to see
if he could exist outside of the Western machine.
He was testing his own theories in the most extreme
way possible. And what did he find? What did
four years in the jungle do to a Parisian intellectual?
He found silence. That's the biggest thing he
talks about in interviews. In the West, we are
constantly bombarded with noise words, ads, media,
traffic. The Ember culture was based on a different
kind of communication, a connection to the immediate
environment, paying attention. I found this quote
in the research where he talks about how living
there stripped away his intellectual armor. That's
the key. You can't be a pretentious French philosopher
when you have to worry about jaguars or finding
clean water or navigating a river in a dugout
canoe. Your master's thesis doesn't help you
there. Not at all. The jungle demands that you
be present. It forces a kind of humility. He
said later that he arrived there thinking he
knew things. He was the educated European and
left realizing he knew nothing. There's a story
about him getting sick, right? Yes. He felt very
ill at one point. He had a scorpion sting, I
believe, and got a terrible fever. And the tribe
cared for him. They used their traditional medicine,
their knowledge of plants, and that experience
of vulnerability, of being completely dependent
on these people who had none of the technology
of the West, but had a profound knowledge of
healing and care. That shifted his worldview.
He stopped seeing them as primitive. And started
seeing them as perhaps more advanced in the ways
that actually matter. And this is where the sensual
ecstasy comes in, right? The Nobel Committee's
phrase, it's not sexual. It's sensory. Exactly.
It's the ecstasy of the senses. Feeling the rain
on your skin, smelling the rot and the bloom
of the jungle, watching the light change on the
river. He stopped trying to analyze the world
and started trying to feel it. He got out of
his head and into his body. And he didn't just
sit there and feel things. He actually did work.
He translated their mythology. He did, and this
is important. He didn't just romanticize them.
He treated their culture with the same academic
rigor he would have treated Greek or Roman culture.
He translated Le Prophétie de Chilam Balam. He
wrote a doctoral thesis on the history of Mexico.
But he wasn't writing about the conquerors. He
was writing about the conquered. He was looking
at history from the losing side. So he comes
out of the jungle in 1974. He's married now to
Jemia, who is Moroccan. He's got kids, and obviously
he can't write the same. way he did before. You
can't write jagged experimental novels about
insanity after you've lived that kind of life.
You really can't. The old tools don't work anymore.
And that leads us to his literary metamorphosis.
In the late 70s, he pivots completely. What changed
in the writing itself? If I picked up a book
from 1965 and a book from 1980, would I know
they were by the same guy? You might doubt it.
the jagged nervous almost paranoid energy of
his early work disappears in its place comes
this long flowing lyrical style it's smoother
it's almost hypnotic and the subjects change
too completely he stops writing about urban alienation
and starts writing about the desert the sea the
sky childhood travel and this deep connection
to the environment and the book that really marked
this change the one everyone points to is desire
published in 1980. Dessert is a masterpiece.
It won the Grand Prix Pomerant from the Académie
Française. It's the book that proved he wasn't
just a 60s flash in the pan. He was a major,
major writer with something new to say. Tell
us the story. What happens in Dessert? It has
two timelines, which is brilliant. One is set
in the present day, well, the late 70s, following
a young girl named Lala. She's a descendant of
the Blue Men, the Touareg nomads of the Sahara.
The Blue Men? Yeah, from the indigo dye they
used. So she lives in a shantytown on the edge
of a Moroccan... city. She's poor. She's marginalized.
But she has this incredible, fierce connection
to nature. She talks to the insects. She stares
at the sea. She has this inner freedom. And the
other timeline. The other timeline goes back
to 1909 and 1910. It tells the story of the Tuareg
tribes, her ancestors, fleeing across the desert
to escape the French colonial army. So again,
he's taking the perspective of the displaced.
He is writing about the people running away from
the civilization that Leclessio himself technically
belongs to. Exactly. And the way he writes about
the desert is stunning. He describes it not as
a wasteland, not as something empty, but as a
place of purity, of blinding light, of freedom.
The free men of the desert possess nothing, but
they have the horizon. So what happens to Lala?
She eventually goes to France. She ends up in
Marseille and she works as a model, actually,
but she hates it. She sees the city as a cold,
dead place full of slaves to money and image.
It's a prison compared to the desert. It sounds
like he's taking all that anger from his youth.
the anger at society and channeling it through
this girl. But instead of just screaming, he's
showing us the beauty of the alternative. That's
a perfect way to put it. He's not just critiquing
the West anymore. He's offering an alternative
vision of beauty. He's saying, look at what we
destroyed. Look at the dignity of these people
we called savages. And clearly it worked. The
audience responded. This wasn't just for philosophers
in Paris anymore. Not at all. This new style
brought him a huge mainstream audience. By the
90s, he was a titan. In 1994, Lear Magazine did
a survey and 13 % of readers voted him the greatest
living French writer. 13 %? Yeah. That's a huge
number in a poll like that. It's massive. He
was being translated into 30 languages. He had
become the voice of the ailleurs, the elsewhere.
I like that. So he's established, he's beloved,
he's living this global life. Albuquerque, Mauritius,
nice. He's found his rhythm. And then... The
biggest phone call of a writer's life comes in.
2008, the Nobel Prize in Literature. It had been
a while for the French, hadn't it? A long time
between wins. A long drought. The last French
language winner was Claude Simon in 1985. So
this is a huge moment, a kind of homecoming for
the prize. And we talked about the citation earlier,
explorer of a humanity beyond and below. Yeah.
But they also called him the author of New Departures.
What do you think they meant by that? I think
they were acknowledging that shift we just talked
about. They recognize that he was brave enough
to reinvent himself. Most writers find a style
that works and they stick to it forever. Leclitzio
broke his own mold because his life experience
demanded it. He had the courage to depart from
his own success. How did he handle the win? Was
he gracious? Yeah. Did he seem overwhelmed? He
was very le glasio about it. He said he was touched,
but he immediately deflected the glory to his
mixed heritage. He said, I was born of a mix
like many people currently in Europe. He used
the moment to validate the idea of being a mongrel,
of not belonging to just one nation. He made
it about everyone, not just about him. It's very
consistent with his character. Completely. And
then came the lecture. The Nobel lecture is always
a big moment. You have the world's attention.
What are you going to say? He titled it Dans
la Forre des Paradoxes, In the Forest of Paradoxes,
which is a great title. And what was the message?
What paradox was he focused on? He used the platform
to attack information poverty. Information poverty.
That sounds like a tech term. Like he's complaining
about slow broadband speed. It does sound like
that, but he meant it culturally. He was talking
about who gets to be heard, whose stories get
told. He pointed out that the vast majority of
human beings in Africa, in the Amazon, in the
slums of Asia do not have access to books. And
more importantly, their own stories aren't being
published. Their myths, their poems, their histories
are oral and they're disappearing. So he's saying
that literature with a capital L is an exclusive
club. Exactly. He's saying it's a luxury club
for the West. And by ignoring the stories of
the rest of the world, we are impoverishing ourselves.
We are missing out on 90 percent of the human
experience. It was a very humanist plea. He wasn't
talking about great art. He was talking about
basic human dignity and the right to have your
story heard. It's consistent with the guy who
got kicked out of Thailand for protesting. He
never lost that advocacy. He never became just
an artist in an ivory tower. He didn't. And it
kept engaging globally. Even after the Nobel,
he didn't just retire to a villa in Nice. He
went to South Korea to teach at Ewha Women's
University. He went to China to teach at Nanjing
University. I love the image of this guy. You
picture a Nobel laureate, you maybe picture him
in a dusty library in Paris. But LeClessio is
moving between Seoul, Nanjing. Albuquerque and
Nice. He is constantly teaching, learning, moving.
He is a shark. If he stops moving, he dies. Or
at least his creativity dies. He needs that friction
of new cultures, new languages to spark his writing.
He thrives on being a foreigner. Now, we have
to address that with a figure this complex. It's
not always smooth sailing. We can't paint him
as a saint. Even a Nobel Peace Prize adjacent
figure like him can step into controversy. Yes,
and we need to discuss the Mama Rosa situation
in 2014. This gives us a glimpse into how his
worldview can sometimes clash with a very messy
reality. This one is tricky. Let's lay out the
facts first. Who was Mama Rosa? Mama Rosa was
the founder and director of a shelter in Mexico
called La Gran Familia. She was a legendary figure.
For decades, she took in street children, orphans,
kids nobody else wanted. She was seen as a savior,
a living saint by many. But then came the raid.
July 2014, Mexican federal police raid the shelter.
And what they find is horrific. The report said
there were insects in the food. Children were
malnourished. Some were being held against their
will, preventing parents from picking them up.
It was described as a house of horrors in the
media. A really grim situation. And Leclesio
stepped in. He did. He wrote an opinion piece
in Le Monde, the biggest newspaper in France.
And he defended her vehemently. He argued that
she was close to sanctity. That is a risky stance
when the police are parading evidence of abuse
on the nightly news. Why did he do that? Was
he ignoring the evidence? It's complicated. I
don't think he was ignoring it, but I think he
was viewing it through a very specific lens,
his lens. He knew Mama Rosa. He had visited the
shelter. He likely saw a woman who was doing
the dirty work that the Mexican state had refused
to do for decades. So he saw the state, the reigning
civilization, attacking a woman who was caring
for the humanity below. That's it, exactly. From
his point of view, he probably thought, how dare
the government, which leaves these kids on the
street, come in and judge the one woman trying
to feed them, however imperfectly. He saw it
as a colonial -style intervention, authority
versus the grassroots. But if the allegations
were true, he was defending an abuser. And that's
the conflict. His loyalty to the outsider and
his distrust of authority maybe blinded him to
the reality that sometimes the outsider can be
abusive too. It highlights that his philosophy
siding with the marginalized isn't always neat
and tidy. It can be messy. It shows the limits
of that worldview sometimes. It reminds us that
he's driven by emotion and personal connection,
not necessarily by cold, hard facts. His loyalty
is to the people on the ground. Right. He is
a poet, not a judge. And that loyalty can sometimes
lead him into complex moral territory. But if
we zoom out from that specific incident, his
advocacy has been pretty consistent on the big
themes, hasn't it? Absolutely. Throughout his
life, he has focused on ecological concerns long
before it was trendy. Books like Terra Amata
and the Giants from way back in the 60s and 70s
were about urban pollution and environmental
destruction. The displacement of people. Constantly.
Wandering Stars about a young Jewish girl fleeing
the Nazis and then an Arab girl displaced by
the creation of Israel. Onitsha is about the
legacy of colonialism. And of course, Indigenous
Voices, as we saw with his translations, he has
consistently used his platform. to find a light
on the things reigning civilization wants to
ignore. So as we wrap this up, let's go to the
synthesis. We have called him the man of elsewhere.
It really seems to fit. I think that's the only
title that does fit. Look at the arc. He starts
with an ancestor fleeing the French Revolution
because he won't cut his hair. He's the boy on
the boat to Nigeria seeing a new world. He's
the protester in Thailand. He's the tribe member
in Panama. And finally, the Nobel laureate in
Sweden. It's a life defined by movement and crossing
borders. He really is a bridge. He connects the
reigning civilization, Europe, the West, the
academy with the humanity below, the indigenous,
the marginalized, the forgotten. And he doesn't
just connect them. He suggests that the value,
the truth, and the beauty are often found on
the side of the humanity below. He argues that
they have something to teach us. Which brings
us to a final slightly provocative thought to
leave with everyone. LeClessio started his career
writing about insanity in the West. He was obsessed
with madness, alienation, the breakdown of the
self in the modern city. He ended up writing
about sensual ecstasy in the global South and
the indigenous world. It was a complete reversal.
It really was, from torment to a kind of grace.
So the question is this. Does LeClessio's journey
suggest that for him, sanity and peace are impossible
within the structures of modern West? Western
civilization. Does he believe that to be truly
whole, to be sane, you have to escape the skyscrapers
and the rules and go back to the desert? I think
he might argue that, or at least he argues that
we need to let the desert into our skyscrapers.
We need to remember that we are part of nature,
not masters of it. We need that other perspective
to keep ourselves sane. It's a question he leaves
for us to answer. And I suppose the best way
to do that is to pick up his books. If you want
to find out for yourself. Pick up dessert. Or
read the African. It might just change the way
you see your own little fatherland. Indeed. It's
worth the trip. That's it for this deep dive.
Thanks for listening and keep exploring. Until
next time.