Tournent les violons…

“All of us lead two parallel lives: the one we are actively living, and the one we feel we should have had.”

– Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

In the course of our lives there are some pivotal moments that when we reminisce about them, we say:

– ‘what if I have had done that instead of this’

– ‘I should have done that instead of this’

– ‘I wish that course of events had happened’

These points in time are about our parallel unlived lives. In ‘Missing Out’, Adam Phillips suggests we live few lives. One is the one we actively are living and we live the rests in the forms of wishes and regrets. The unlived lives have a lot to tell. In many occasions, we are unaware of them until they are revealed to us through a significant moment or encounter. Adam Phillips explains the moment of falling in love as such an occasion:

“The person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have been quite literally expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies.”

Now let’s watch this:

In this music video, the prince gave a simple compliment to the maid: “Tu es bien jolie” (You are really pretty). This is one of those pivotal moments that an unlived or a wished-for life reveals itself to one. Maid falls in love with prince because entire her life she had dreamed about this. Almost at the end of lyrics, we see:

“Passent les années dures et grises à servir

Une vie de peine et si peu de plaisir

Mais ce trouble là brûle en ses souvenirs”

English:

“The years have passed hard and grey in servitude

A life of sorrow and so few pleasures

But this turmoil burns in her memories”

Why this single moment of time haunts the maid after so many years? Because what the maid had for a long time wished for and dreamed about, for the first time, for a single moment, seemed so real and so accessible. It was in this moment when the maid told herself: “I surrender. I’m in love.”

Before this moment, the wishes were in the form of unconscious dreams, after this moment, the wishes are in the form of conscious fantasies. To me, the most tragic and the most intense moment of this video music is 4:08 when maid’s fantasies shatter into pieces, when the reality seems to be at its cruellest. At the end of video, Jean-Jacques Goldman is walking in the empty castle. The castle has been empty for centuries, but it is as if the memory is still alive (for the maid).

The violins are still spinning. The memory, in the form of an unlived life, is still living.

Tournent les violons

Tournent les violons

Tournent les violons

…