The Time of Surrealism

At the tender age of 18, philosophy student Ferdinand Alquié became acquainted with the writer Joë Bousquet, who was then just in his thirties but already much more advanced in life. Alquié was born in Carcassonne, a fortified city in the south of France, and had not left the city yet. Near the end of the First World War, Bousquet came to live in that town too, to reside with his sister, in a room with the shutters permanently closed. The friendship between Alquié and Bousquet lasted for the rest of their shared lives, and can be felt still in the published letters Bousquet wrote to him over the years. There are letters from the early 1930s, in which Bousquet asks the young and eager Alquié to be cautious with regard to the Russian communist party and to notice how their ideas differ from what Marx actually had to say. In other letters, Bousquet tells Alquié to pursue his interests in Descartes and Spinoza, of whom he, already as a young man, could talk so vividly. Intelligent and eloquently written letters they are, in the topics discussed but also in those left out. Only rarely do they mention the horrors of their times, the way in which, after the Great Depression hit the European continent, the 1930s became the time when the sun would finally go down on Europe. After the great nineteenth century in which Europe had given birth to its prodigy child modernism, as well as to nationalism, racism and sexism, Europe now introduced its people to its final beastly offspring: fascism. After its working classes were ruined by the financial crises, a venomous nihilism overtook Europe again (as Nietzsche had already foreseen) and was making people, more than ever, celebrate the death of Otherness, knowing damn well that this would eventually also kill themselves.

Alquié and Bousquet lived through these times very consciously. Yet in their correspondence they prefer not to analyse these matters. Bousquet writes a lot about the music of Beethoven and is keen to share with Alquié many of the wonderful books he has read over the years.