"Ici-bas" and "là-bas" or how to seek redemption from his present

Two french words  very meaningful to me! I don´t like the french language because all French teachers in the world have conspired against me. They tortured  me until I said goodbye to French culture. Apparently these torturers knew that, paradoxically, the french culture is the only one in which my work feels somewhat at home.

It all started with the word "ici-bas" that I had to learn in the first French lesson. It means here-down and comes from a poem of the French Middle Ages. From then on, I hated school and no longer understood the world. I wanted to live in today and had absolutely no request to return to the Middle Ages. Many years later, when the teacher in question lived retired in Paris, he wrote me a letter and praised one of my short films as great art.

And today the post man brought me a book named "Là-Bas" translated as Down There or The Damned, that I had added to my wish list on Amazon years ago. It has attached to a recent order without my knowledge and is now "ici-bas" in front of me.

A novel written by Joris-Karl Huysmans about the failure of a life-weary, decadent literary figure in Fin de Siècle, who seeks redemption from his present, which is perceived as ugly and senseless. It is Huysmans' most famous work after À rebours. Là-Bas deals with the subject of Satanism in contemporary France (first published 1891).

Huysman wrote it in a Benedictine monastery, where he lived his last years and where he finally learned to accept the world's suffering. 

There is no monastery in my neighborhood, but I have my cell where I can look in my pictures for the meaning of life. (BK)