IONESCO Eugène. Journal (Les débris du Souvenir). Autograph - Lot 192

IONESCO Eugène. Journal (Les débris du Souvenir). Autograph manuscript signed at the end and dated "Spring 1939"; 38 pages on 38 in-4 sheets detached from a school notebook. The diary was published in 1967 by Gallimard under the title Journal en miettes. Born in Romania in 1909 and brought to France as a child, Ionesco lived with his family in La Chapelle-Anthevaise, a village near Laval in the Mayenne region. It was here that he "learned about the great human community, near and far, temporal and extra-temporal, visible and invisible". In these pages, written before the Second World War, he reflects on this past, spontaneously noting his observations and obsessions. Dreamlike images sometimes overlap with reality, containing the seeds of unanswered questions that would lead to a concept of the absurd. We read at the end: "Bad news in the papers. War, perhaps? I'm afraid it's the end of everything. Death is the last, the definitive present. In the sinking ship I live multiplied, my own fear. The fear of others. Crying over myself? Or for others? I imagine a civilization in ruins. A poignant, unspeakable regret, the death of all is my own death. What's left of a world? Remnants of memories, as with an individual being: detached from oneself, foreign to the generations to come: the mutilated arm of a statue, some potiches; we'll know something about the court of Louis XIV, ... Romanticism, ... Gallic mistletoe... colorless, inexpressive images, barely emerging from the ocean of oblivion. In a few centuries, Europe will be as alien to mankind as the pre-Columbian civilizations.