When Reality Comes Knocking

IN 1991 it was revealed that Elizabeth Craig, a wealthy American dancer, had been taken by French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) to a grubby backstreet in which Dutch women were openly renting their children to paedophiles.

– You see how vicious life is?

– It can’t be all over the world like that, maybe it’s just the Dutch who like that kind of thing.

– No, it goes on in Paris too, but not quite in the same way.

– Why don’t you do something about it? If you think it’s so terrible, why don’t you try to make it illegal?

– Oh, but it is illegal. They could get in bad trouble if caught, but on certain streets you can walk up and down and the gendarme or policemen will look the other way.

Elizabeth had been raised in a typical bourgeois family and had never experienced the dark underbelly of crushing poverty, gratuitous violence and sexual depravity. When she asked Céline why he had taken her to such a horrific place, he replied:

“I just wanted you to know. You who think that everybody is so beautiful and nice, that life is so simple, that all you have to do is have a happy attitude and life will be a beautiful journey.”

This, or so it seems to me, is the situation most people find themselves in today; regardless of class, social status or upbringing. It is common for someone to watch a particular television station in the full knowledge that it will tell them lies and yet send them to bed with the glowing satisfaction that death and destruction only happens on the other side of the world and that the comfort and gloss of the Disney channel is only a mere ‘click’ away. We live in a time when men like to talk the talk, but rarely walk the walk; when many women are so eager to overcome their terrible lack of self-esteem that they alter their bodies with Botox; when lonely children are expected to choose their identities from the range of fictional characters offered in a video game.

Everybody is hiding from something and nobody wants to be themselves. All is play, nothing is real. Simply because the pain and suffering is too much to bear. Without engaging with life, however, that same pain and suffering will continue and one day it may come knocking on your door. Life can be beautiful, and often is, but it can also be very ugly. The Barbies and Kens of this world have as much chance of surviving that ugliness as a delicate soap bubble at a gathering of porcupines.