Original subtitles

We dream about what we've lost,

what we've never had, what we'll never have.

We dive deep within a world

that is only calm, joy, plenitude and happiness.

To wake up is to be born again

in the world of despair.

Nothing distinguishes the memory from the other moments.

They're only recognized later on.

The dream that ended

opened the wound.

It had started to bleed yesterday.

It had been five years since she, who was his whole childhood

who he didn't think he loved that much, had left him

Even the beginning had been terrible.

He did not know he had the ability to suffer that much.

And then

There had been the nights,

the nights that reminded him that his whole being was distraught.

But the nights are sometimes short.

And the sickness had turned into poison.

And this poison, which was gaining ground

in his body, day after day,

had made his life something that resembled Hell.

This venomous body caused such ravages inside of him

That, sometimes, he would have liked to be able to scream.

Scream for hours, alone, in his corner.

It was an insidious sickness, tenacious and impalpable.

A sickness that left him helpless,

he who never had to struggle against anything.

Yet one night,

sleep gave him a chance to see her again,

more beautiful than he had ever known her to be,

Even more beautiful than his mother, when she caressed his lips,

kissing him to get him to sleep when he was a child.

He felt such a violent delight,

so intense, that every night,

every day since,

he has been inhaled by this inner world.

The only one which was not intolerable.

Childhood is the geometrical place of all nostalgias

Humanity at the center of its misfortune,

will search in its prehistory,

a golden age, an earthly paradise during which she would have lived,

bathed in the light.

For the individual, the approach is the same.

Yet, looking at it more closely,

childhood is the most atrocious period of existence.

These are the long years of anguish,

the recurring nightmares.

These are also the sting of slaps,

the punishments,

the aborted hopes,

the long waits, lived in a time which seems to have no end.

It's also the center of gravity

of all the serious and definitive cracks.

He remembered

a scene from when he was 5 or 6 years old.

His family had a young and very beautiful housemaid,

Mademoiselle Pierre.

One evening,

she was lying, lightly dressed, on the couch,

reading.

He was close to her.

He asked her

if he could slip under her skirt.

She said yes on the condition that he wouldn't say anything to anyone.

She was barely clothed

and he touched her belly.

Since, he has kept

a raging and agonizing curiosity to see the female body.

He remembered again the extreme eagerness he experienced when having a bath,

waiting for the naked servant to get in the water.

He remembered that he had another housemaid,

who was young and beautiful too,

and who had abscesses on her thighs that she used to push in the evening.

He looked forward to this moment to satisfy his curiosity.

He then remembered a scene.

They had all sat together,

The two servants, the cook, his brother and himself.

He suddenly heard Mademoiselle Pierre say:

"We could probably do this with his brother"

"But he's too clumsy, he would certainly fail".

He didn't really understand what she meant by that

but he felt humiliated all the same and started crying.

Mademoiselle Pierre tried to console him

and told him that a servant, who had done that with a little boy,

had been sent to prison for several months.

But he didn't think she had done forbidden things with him.

The picture of old age is twofold.

By the wasting away of the flesh,

it outrages the conscience.

It assaults the ego who watches, powerless

the spectacle of the growing indifference from others

before this pile of flesh and bone, wrinkling,

emptying and which will soon frighten.

Old age is in a way the mark of pestilence,

The sign which alerts the others that they must take their distances,

for fear of seeing in themselves rise again the anguish and the doubt

that they had so much difficulty to bury under a heap of indifference.

But perhaps, the forced respite of the senses

marks the start of the liberation.

The purpose of the grave is to make a distinction

between the human corpse and other objects such as stones.

What we call death is the conscience that we have of it.

We perceive the transition from the state of living to the corpse,

that is to say the harrowing object for a man

that is the corpse of another man.

It reflects a violence that will not only

destroy one man but which will destroy all the men.

The dead person is a danger for those who remain,

If they bury it, it is not to protect it but rather

to protect themselves from this contagion.

This mess, this putrefaction to come,

just like the fresh corpse,

is the image of destiny

and carries in itself a threat.

We don't believe in the contagious magic anymore

but who among us could say

that at the sight of a worm-filled corpse,

they would not turn pale?

Freud in Mourning and Melancholia:

Melancholia is the reaction to the loss of a loved one.

It is characterized on a psychological level

by a profoundly painful dejection

and a cessation of interest for the outside world.

But also by the inhibition of all activity

and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings

that finds utterance in

self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional

expectation of punishment.

The patient represents his ego to us as worthless,

incapable of any achievement,

and morally despicable,

he reproaches himself

and expects to be cast out and punished

The picture of this delusion of inferiority

is completed by the defeat of the instinct

which compels every living thing to cling to life.

The process features a regression to the original narcissism.

One characteristic makes this affliction interesting.

The melancholic's cathexis in regard to the loved and lost one

has undergone a double vicissitude.

Part of it has regressed,

but the other part has been carried back to the stage of sadism.

It is this sadism alone that solves the riddle of the tendency to suicide.

We have long known, it is true,

that no neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which

he has not turned back upon himself

from murderous impulses against others

The analysis of melancholia now shows that the ego

can kill itself only if

it can treat itself as the object

of love at the same time hostile.

We observe that in two opposed situations,

love at its most extreme and suicide,

the ego is literally crushed

by the object.