Everything started with the fact that I collect quotes. It goes way back to my teens, but how this curating of other people’s words took hold in me is fuzzy, and what does it matter? I’m 62 years old and still do it. It will happen when I’m reading, and come across a string of words and sentences that jump off the page and straight to a place inside me that is mostly about emotion, but something else too. Words written by someone else that feel as though they were already there inside me, waiting. Language that resonates. Sometimes, it’s a sequence of words that I could never have come up with in a million years of trying; a permutation so rich and so absolutely bullseye that I marvel at their perfection and think: Wow! Imagine being able to write that! At times, my body will take in their impact like they were the arrow, and I, the target. At times, they will make me gasp. At others, tears will well up. Sometimes, they’ll just bring me to a full stop, a stillness in which the most I can do is hold my hands to my chest and say Oh! Imagine being able to write that!
I have heard people speak and rushed to jot down their exact wording. If I’m lucky, and I heard them on television or the radio, I can retrace the podcast or YouTube footage that captured their words. There are books filled with such astonishing prose that I commit that dread act of vandalism–I mark passages that I want to keep–but always with a pencil (never ink! Good grief!).
There are humans who, above the rest of us, were born to be quoted. Winston Churchill sure had a knack for quotable pronouncements, but I’m thinking of people like James Baldwin, who spoke as though writing—and sometimes wrote as though preaching—and always takes us to a place we would never have reached. I’ve come across no one else who spoke so acutely and unpredictably. He has startled me over and over, with simple statements like:
“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
Those among us who love and collect quotes have our favourite sources, but I’m chuffed to think that as long as there are books out there, even if the whole world goes mute, I will have places to search for mind-and-soul-feeding eloquence.
Early on, when I was still receiving quotes every morning, dropped into my Inbox (from Goodreads), I’d choose the very best and post them on Facebook. That source, that daily prod dried up eventually, but my need to find sources of inspiration—models of concise and deep thinking—was as strong as ever, and so I continued my search for the kind of encapsulated writing that is like gold for someone like me.
The process was made easy by the host of sites that do the compiling and curating of quotes. French or English, both are my native languages and either is fine, except that I quickly discovered that online English language sources outnumber the French ones by a huge proportion. So the scales definitely tipped toward quotes in English (including translations from other languages). Quotes from curation sites are doorways to discovering writers, thinkers, creators, doers—and push us to keep excavating.
But even though they were backlit on computer and smart phone screens, there was an element missing—a cue that would stimulate other and new ways of interpreting the words. In her inspiring blog, Brainpickings, Maria Popova has elevated the interplay of words and images to a masterful degree, and her vision has not been lost on me. I naturally began posting language coupled with images, with the sole intent of inspiring anyone open to examining them. Some people are first seduced by the words; others by the image. The feedback started to come. A great many friends (and friends of friends, as Facebook’s algorithms did their work) took the time to comment, almost always struck by the words, the image chosen, or the effect of both. It made me happy, and so, inevitably, I continued.
But something has changed since March 2020. It began earlier, in 2018, following the diagnosis of metastatic cancer that redrew my life. Forced into a 2-week cycle of treatment, it didn’t take long to realize that how I lived had to change drastically. Where I used to move around constantly, from workplace to workplace for my job teaching French as a Second Language to adults, I would now have to adapt to a jobless, smaller, more circumscribed and isolating life—using the week between chemotherapy treatments to recover, refashioning my daily existence.
I owe an unpayable debt to social media, specifically Facebook—that much maligned invader—for making it possible to come close to erasing the barriers that would have kept me trapped in a world shrunken to the borders of the house and this small town I live in (no other online presence, other than blogging, allows me to do almost anything I want in terms of content format). Facebook worked best by making it so easy for others to find me (I’m thinking here especially about the many of my former students with whom I’ve stayed connected), and provided me with a shared, multigenerational meeting place.
It’s during this period that I found the friend who is the heart of Aubade, and who provided the impetus to its existence. Before we met on Facebook, I only knew Louise Cloutier because she had been a friend of my son Simon while he was working towards his PhD in Ecology at Université de Montréal (from 2008-2011), where Louise worked as a taxonomist.
I began to notice her name tagged on content, or comments she made on Simon’s Facebook page. Over time, we began exchanging messages directly. Then came March 2020 and the full force of COVID-19. It feels strange to write this but…do you remember those first few months? (think how much has changed since then; think how punch drunk we’ve all become) .That first month of lockdown, all over the internet people were beginning to play—thinking it was the best way to fill the long days of confinement. I remember in particular the LIST 10 THINGS…trend, that had so many of us posting our top 10 favourite movies, TOP 10 favourite albums, album covers; our TOP 10 baby photos, books, book covers…Those games went on and on.
They DID get us talking online, and pestering each other with participation requests, and in a few cases, they allowed us to connect more deeply with people. By the time “list fatigue” had set in for good, for me at least, Louise Cloutier and I had become frequent correspondents, and I think that it’s just about then that she remarked the knack she thought I had for matching words and images—something I’d been told a few times before, but that resonated this time. She said that she would miss these lists and the collective online creativity.
So, I proposed a new project to Louise: every day, for as long as were willing to keep at it, she would provide me with a quote, and I would find the image to enhance it. Because Louise is francophone (but also speaks and reads English and some German, I think), I knew this would mean that she would likely be digging up quotes from the hundreds, if not thousands of books in her home, or working very hard to find inspiring French content online. I also took it as a lovely gesture of trust, of letting go enough to allow me to modulate her personal interpretation of the words spoken or written by another that she admired. Whatever unease I felt about making a daily commitment—even something as burden-free as finding an image to match someone’s selection of words—wasn’t enough to dampen the feeling that this was a feisty act of “cloistered-pandemic” resistance.
We began on April 10th and are still going strong. Our process is simple. Louise and I connect every morning—usually before 7:30—on Messenger. She’s almost always the one who’s up first. Of the things that come up in our exchanges is always the quote she has selected. For example, this morning’s (October 20th 2020) just happens to be from Meryl Streep, and is in English. But it’s far more often something Louise has dug up from a book.
Posted first on my Facebook page, it’s headline is:
COLLABORATION / OFFERING NO.173
(Note: il s’agit ici d’une collaboration quotidienne, si possible, entre Louise Cloutier et moi.
Elle fournit la citation, je fournis le support visuel). Pour toi, Louise Cloutier xoxoxo
Yes, since we first decided to have fun with this, we have published an image-enhanced quote over 170 times–as I write this introduction.
But there is so much more to this story than this ritual. Our daily “Collaboration/Offering” is also the story of a burgeoning friendship. It’s about what’s happening in each of our lives—or those parts that we are open to sharing—and also, quite simply, about our moods, our soul- states as we awaken to each new day.
This explains the name we chose for this blog, Aubade. The Poetry Foundation offers the following as a definition of the word : “A love poem or song welcoming or lamenting the arrival of the dawn. The form originated in medieval France.” It is exactly the same in French. And it was Louise’s suggestion (I had never heard it before). And so, Aubade is filled with our words of welcome, but also of lament. In this pandemic year especially, both have their place.
I’ve also decided, with Louise’s editorial approval, to occasionally include excerpts from those early morning exchanges we have, in French, before we settle on the day’s quote and set off into our lives, lived about 30 km apart.
Aubade is a bilingual blog–which gives it an originality I think–but not systematically translated, which means that most readers, whether English-speaking or French-speaking, with a modicum of familiarity with the second of the two languages, should be able to enjoy every entry. The advantage of posting bilingually is of course that it opens the possibilities for Louise, especially, and broadens the pool we draw from. It also represents who we are.
I’ve chosen not to post our “Offerings” of these past 7 months in chronological order, but instead randomly, though the date they appeared on Facebook is always noted, and you will be able to find them all listed by month in the CATEGORIES column–if you’re curious to see whether the tone of our posts changed as the full force of COVID-19 began bearing down on us.
This blog is an act of curation, certainly, but also of preservation. It’s one example, among many online, of how human beings responded to confinement, isolation and deprivations we had never anticipated, and how many of us responded through art and by reaching out to each other.
Just about a week ago, Louise wrote to me one morning:
“L’exercice que nous faisons active les souvenirs dans toutes les directions: lectures, films, amours, amitiés, moments de partage, instants intenses.” (LC)
Perhaps it will have this effect on you?
Welcome to Aubade. Come visit us every day.
Aubade 
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