Chapter 60 from Ce bel aujourd’hui copyright by Jacques Lacarrière.[1]
A refinery by night: an oriental city with illuminated minarets, a party ship on motionless waves, a hive of phosphorescent bees … thus can you imagine it from a certain distance away. From afar, everything suggests a party, a grand reception in some city of the future, and images still more enchanting (if you squint a little): a checkerboard of flaming figures, a fortress of stars, an extra-terrestrial vessel descended from the heavens. From a certain distance, such mirages and fleeting moments of magic are all possible.
But the mirages and magic fade away as soon as you open your eyes and approach the scene of the party. What was enchanting and unsubstantial turns into a dense, interlaced design of tubes and pipes, a forest of columns and metal towers, a swarm of exchangers, condensers, and reservoirs. It becomes an immense puzzle of furnaces, vats, spheres, pumping stations, and storage tanks. A puzzle which day and night huffs and puffs, hisses and whistles amidst countless plumes of smoke and steam, which filters, cracks, condenses, distills, liquefies, and gasifies. It is as though a festival of Essences were being celebrated here, lit by thousands of footlights and spotlights, announced from afar by the flame and oriflamme of candelabra.
Fraction. Distillation. Cracking. Condensation. Liquefaction. Evaporation. Refining, in a word. All of those operations transform the black naphtha, that heavy bitumen from the depths of the earth, into a clear and volatile essence. And the honey produced by this humming hive is, of course, fuel oil.
Diesel fuel. Tar. Asphalt. Acetylene. Saturated hydrocarbons. The names of the latter–ethane, methane, butane, propane, pentane, hexane, heptane, and octane–evoke the eight children of parents with a sense of humor. I think of those names–those children–wandering at night through the passageways of the refinery, surrounded by a jumble of metal columns with the occasional red rose of a pressure gauge, and by the stubborn braying of the cracking towers. Prevailing over all is the subtle odor of a Miocene swamp. Everywhere are the fetid smells of an alchemy which transforms, day and night, the gold of fossil plankton. An alchemy whose different stages are followed and supervised from the control room. There, noises and passions are softened, and you can talk to your neighbor without shouting into his ear. On a screen studded with luminous dots and circuits, you can follow the progress of the oils, the path of the gasoline, and the birth of the saturated hydrocarbons and their sextuplet sisters with the melodious names: ethylene and acetylene, benzene and toluene, xylene and naphthalene. A cantilena of distillates.
A refinery by night? From up close, machinery puffing on tirelessly, dreamlessly. From a distance, an astral party, an enchanted fairyland.
Translator’s Note
Jacques Lacarrière was a well-known French author, educator, journalist, translator, and traveler. Over the past forty-five years, he has published a long list of works on subjects as diverse as mythology, travel, spirituality and nature. They include essays, narratives, translations, poems, and one novel. Author of L’ete grec, Chemin faisant, Men Possessed by God, and The Gnostics, among others, he was also a lecturer, storyteller and producer, and had appeared on radio and television. Long fascinated by the Mediterranean, he lived for extended periods in Greece and translated ancient and modern Greek authors. In 1991, Mr. Lacarrière won the prestigious Grand Prix de littérature of the Académie française for his collected works. At the time I met him to discuss publishing his essays in English, the author lived in a small village in Burgundy.
When Jacques Lacarrière was born in 1925, the world was beginning to change more rapidly than ever before. During his lifetime, Mr. Lacarrière had seen train travel evolve from the steam locomotive to the TGV, transatlantic air travel progress from the first propeller flight to the Concorde, and space travel move from comic books to everyday reality. He watched the evolution of everything from automobiles to architecture, from supermarkets to satellites, from toys to telephones, from cloning to computers, from movies to medicine, from plastics to particle physics. Jacques Lacarrière’s personal experience and poetic vision combine in a particularly appropriate commentary on our modern world.
Whether Mr. Lacarrière saw genius, beauty or harm in the inventions of our era, he used vivid, striking imagery to portray them in what he calls “this reader for contemporary times”. It was the remarkable imagery, in fact, that prompted me to undertake translating the book from the French. From the Comics to the Cosmos could be described as a collection of short essays chronicling innovations that the twentieth century had brought, as seen through the eyes of a poet. Mr. Lacarrière allows us to view the familiar in extraordinary new ways, and enables us to better appreciate aspects of our century with which we may or may not be personally acquainted.
This book–whose original title, Ce bel aujourd’hui, was taken from a Mallarme sonnet–is partly an autobiographical memoir and partly an account of the past century’s creations, from a French perspective. Interestingly, many of the essays deal with American inventions or achievements and their influence on the author’s life. These include our comic strips, music, movies, planes, trains, automobiles, bathyscaphe dives and land speed records of the 1930s and 1940s, our space program and moon landing of the 1960s, and our wind power plants, satellites and space probes of the 1990s. It is a fitting portrait of the 20th century.
I am grateful to Yves-Bruno Civel, formerly managing director of Systèmes Solaires, for his gift of the book to Paul Gipe, and to Jacques Lacarrière for his poetic account of life in the modern era.
–Nancy Nies
[1] Jacques Lacarrière, Ce bel aujourd’hui (Jean-Claude Lattès, 1989).
