In the following excerpt from Jean Giono’s Occupation Journal, the prolific and fiercely imaginative novelist documents his life in Provence during the Nazi occupation of France. He writes of the weather, his family, the desire to flee, the rumors he hears from the surrounding villages, and his struggles to create “incontestably beautiful work” in the midst of crisis.

Paul Cézanne, Landscape in Provence, 1895–1900, pencil and watercolor on paper, 12″ x 19″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sunday, June 4, 1944

Ten o’clock in the morning, the alert sounds. Immediately followed by violent rumbling at the far end of town, then silence. We’re listening. The most beautiful possible weather. Sun, powder blue sky, a little cool, light wind. Since the other day when ten bombs fell a hundred meters from Margotte, the hens have laid only small eggs, hardly bigger than quail eggs; they have no yolks. Imagine the panic there must be in Marseille now. All is quiet for the moment.

*

Tuesday, June 6, 1944

Charles returns from town with news. First, the Germans are said to have arrived. He didn’t see a single one, but someone told him that they had commandeered a villa on Boulevard Saint-Lazare. Then, the landing has supposedly begun. Where, when, how, no one knows. There’s no trace of it, no indication, but it has begun, no doubt about it. A collective hallucination? Anyone declaring in the empty city today that the Germans haven’t arrived and the landing hasn’t taken place would be torn to pieces.

Cool weather, clouds, overcast sky, crosswinds, still no rain.

Yesterday Mme. X. arrived. For at least three months she’s left me in perfect peace. “If I don’t come anymore,” she said, “it’s because I’m afraid of becoming attached to you.” She makes stupid faces. I answer dryly, “There’s no danger of that.” She protests. I move on and consider how to drive her away.

Began working on Deux cavaliers again.

Serious money worries. Still nothing from Paris, no letters. Wrote to Dambournet, L’Argus du Livre, to propose selling three manuscripts to him, Batailles dans la montagne, Le Poids du ciel, Les Vraies richesses.

A difficult period to get through morally. What I would need is to succeed at some incontestably beautiful work. What I’m writing doesn’t satisfy me. Not enough real work even though I stay shut up in my office the whole day. Irritated by difficulties that I can’t seem to overcome. I’ve hardly written more than a few pages for weeks. And even those aren’t as good as the ones I was writing three months ago. Read More

C Levå, Marinmotiv, oil. Collection of the Maritime Museum in Stockholm. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Certain landlocked cities have lighthouses. On such rivers as the Rhine, the Seine, and the Saint Lawrence, lighthouses gave warning of dangerous areas. In London, the Trinity Buoy Wharf light is still in existence. This hexagonal, pale-brown brick structure is located in an area known as Container City. I remember my father telling me about these buildings when I was a child. To my ears, accustomed to the Spanish language, the word container, which I never completely understood, sounded warlike; I imagined gigantic metal constructions, improbably conical or spherical in shape. It never occurred to me that they would be like shoeboxes.

When I visited that shoebox city, the shipping containers, adapted to function as housing, reminded me of the futuristic cities of nineties movies and TV series. The lighthouse on the wharf looked out of place among the container architecture, yet, like all of its kind, it was experimental in origin. For a time the building was used to train lighthouse keepers, and later to trial the lanterns and lenses that would then be transferred to other lights. It was there that the scientist (and bookbinder) Michael Faraday worked on the fixtures for the South Foreland lighthouse in Kent. A tiny museum at the foot of the lighthouse offers a display of Faraday’s instruments and personal effects.

Today the Trinity Buoy Wharf light has no lantern. It doesn’t illume, but it can be heard because it now has a bell.

The lanterns of lighthouses are the bells of churches. As with light, sound waves can also announce and convene. And in this lighthouse there’s a bell that chimes ceaselessly. A bell that will sound for a millennium. It’s made up of many other bells that chime according to an algorithm designed by Jem Finer. Apparently one day, in almost a thousand years’ time, the music of the bells will come into a harmonic alignment, in a process that can be likened to the planets moving into alignment in the heavens. Read More