À l'aventure (2008)

Etienne Chicot: L'homme sur le banc

Quotes 

• L'homme sur le banc : Anyway, we're all sheep. We all eat at set hours line up to use the can at set hours, we all watch the boob tube. In the past we'd make a public protest of it, at least. But nowadays, slavey's par for the course. We've always been slaves, you'll tell me. But to submit to this extent! We even fuck at set hours. Think for a moment of those who, in a few years' time, will have kids of their own and as a result will have new constraints to deal with.

• L'homme sur le banc : We all imprison ourselves.

• L'homme sur le banc : Look at that poster. Attractive. It was designed to be. Think a little.Panties are meant to protect two orifices. Or to protect us from these two orifices. Brassieres, as you know, are designed to provide support. These two pieces of fabric, their first mission accomplished, are then turned into tools of charm. So they come at a high price, probably because we are all fetishists.

• L'homme sur le banc : Relax, young lady, I'm going. But in any case, whatever you do, what sky can fall on your heads?

• L'homme sur le banc : You know I just realized something really odd. Like you, I observe people and the world around me. All that exists. If I touch someone a woman, you for instance, she'll react. She may slap me. Or be glad about it. But in fact what are you if not a void? Did that shock you?

  Sandrine : You didn't feel anything since I'm a void.

• L'homme sur le banc : What I see. People, trees, that tall building over there.I realise with difficulty, that everything, including the sense of space, and time and distance.All that is entirely in my head. What's more, they're images first seen upside down, then set right by reflex in my mind. In other words I see you upside down. Matter is made up of atoms. Atoms made up of a nucleus and electrons that vibrate around it. But the distance between the nucleus and these electrons is more than a thousand times greater than their dimension. Observe those trees. They look like a compact mass. If you get closer, you realise that void is greater than matter.

• L'homme sur le banc : You see they're exactly the same signs, but you read them in two different ways. What does that prove? That the way you see things and beings is predigested. Unconsciously oriented by acquired knowledge, which can also conceal certain truths. You might tell me, What is truth?

• L'homme sur le banc : Why do we leave the people we love?

• L'homme sur le banc : I love to watch the stars. It's one of those simple things that gives me a small idea of infinity, along with some grandiose poetry at the same time. Did you know the Earth revolves around the sun at 110,000 km an hour? And as the entire solar system revolves at 800,000 km an hour around the centre of the Milky Way, we are now moving one million km an hour through space without realizing it. If the stars all exploded now, we'd see the first burst in four and a half years, and the others gradually over billions of years, in the time it takes the images to reach us. If our sun disintegrated, we'd have to wait eight minutes before seeing it. You think we're alone in the universe? But do you realise, we're the only living beings in our solar system. But the other sun closest to us is four and a half light years away, or more simply, four thousand million billion kilometers. At the speed of 50 km a second, it's the speed of our space probes. It would take us at best 25,000 years to reach the closest possibly inhabited planet. Maybe there are secret doors that allow us to cross space and time in a flash.

• L'homme sur le banc : When I'm alone I ramble on even more. That's why I like your presence.

• L'homme sur le banc : God loves those who dare.

  Sandrine : I don't believe in God.

  L'homme sur le banc : Neither do I. But sometimes it's useful to find a word to talk about certain things we don't know.

• L'homme sur le banc : The sound of my shout spreads at 360 metres a second along the boulevard. Supposing you could travel faster than the sound. You shall overtake it and hear it again. On the other hand had you started before it, at this same speed, at 400 metres a second the shout wouldn't overtake you and you wouldn't hear a thing. You understand? During the last century, physicists all thought the same was true of light. Not at all. You can't catch light. You can't pass light. It's an absolute. Einstein came up with a rather disturbing explanatory model.According to this model, the time we live the speed we move! at, the space we occupy are relative to our speed. Suppose we have the same watch, set in the same way. You travel by plane, I stay here. Your watch goes less fast because the time each of us lives in is different. Obviously, the difference is minute. So minute we can't detect it. But if I now flew in a rocket at 990% of the speed of light and came back to Earth a day later, you will have lived 18 years, and me, 24 hours. The space I occupy, during that time, would become very small, but my mass, let's say my body, would be harder to pull than a thousand freight trains. Taking this theory to its conclusion, we come to think that at the beginning, the universe was just a quantity of matter no bigger than a ping-pong ball which exploded 10 to 20 billion years ago. Let's say 14, more likely. It took 4 billion years for the Milky Way, our galaxy, to appear. 10 billion years ago, before the birth of the solar system. Our Earth dates back 4.5 billion years. In the beginning, we could have touched the Moon with our hand. The Earth cooled off but it took one or two billion years to create the atmosphere, then water. Reptiles date from two or three billion years. Man, probably a million. Imagine that all this time is represented by a 24-hour day. The Stone Age would begin at five minutes to midnight, virtually at the end of the 24 hours. The birth of Christ at one minute to midnight. Most surprising of all, we are here, we human beings, tiny bubbles lost in the immensity, and we have the capacity to understand all that. Because the miracle is that all is logic. If there is a god, he may not be a softie, but he's certainly a very good mathematician.

• L'homme sur le banc : I learned meditation in India. Which means, to stop thinking.

• Sandrine : I thought you didn't believe in anything.

  L'homme sur le banc : I don't believe in a god conceivable to the human mind that's all. Even that I have doubts about.

• L'homme sur le banc : What is life, what is pleasure, what is love? Look at this landscape. What does it inspire in you?

  Sandrine : A feeling of calm and harmony.

  L'homme sur le banc : As it does for me. But, and you know this, it's first of all emptiness, yet at the same time filled with plants and insects, and thousands of animals that devour each other to survive. The plants grow thanks to the light, thanks to the sun. But the balance, the harmony depends on never-ending savagery and murder. Maybe we're nothing more than silly accidents in the universe. Or else fallen angels.

  Sandrine : Fallen from what?

  L'homme sur le banc : I don't know.