Renee
When you consider that a primate’s major preoccupations are sex, territory and hierarchy, spending one’s time reflecting on the meaning of prayer for Augustine of Hippo seems a relatively futile exercise. To be sure, there are those who will argue that mankind aspires to meaning beyond mere impulses. But I would counter that while this is certainly true (otherwise, what am I to do with literature?), it is also utterly false: meaning is merely another impulse, an impulse carried to the highest degree of achievement, in that it uses the most effective means—understanding—to attain its goals. For the quest for meaning and beauty is hardly a sign that man has an elevated nature, that by leaving behind his animal impulses he will go on to find the justification of his existence in the enlightenment of the spirit: no, it is a primed weapon in the service of a trivial and material goal. And when the weapon becomes its own subject, this is the simple consequence of the specific neuronal wiring that distinguishes us from other animals; by allowing us to survive, the efficiency of intelligence also offers us the possibility of complexity without foundation, thought without usefulness, and beauty without purpose. It’s like a computer bug, a consequence without consequence of the subtlety of our cortex, a superfluous perversion making an utterly wasteful use of the means at its disposal. But even when the quest does not wander off in this way, it remains a necessity that does not depart from animality. Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature’s mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable. For a creature like man, who must forge his destiny by means of thought and reflexivity, the knowledge gained from this will perforce be unbearably lucid. We know that we are beasts who have this weapon for survival, and that we are not gods creating a world with our own thoughts, and something has to make our own wisdom bearable, something has to save us from the woeful eternal fever of biological destiny. Therefore, we have invented Art: our animal selves have devised another way to ensure the survival of our species.

Paloma
Anyway, after the rigmarole with the umbrella stand, we went to eat some cakes and drink hot chocolate at Angelina’s, a tea room on the rue de Rivoli. You’ll tell me that nothing could be further removed from the topic of young people in the banlieues burning cars. Well, not at all! I saw something while we were at Angelina’s that offered me a lot of insight about other things. At the table next to ours there was a couple with a baby. The couple were white and their baby was Asian, a little boy they called Théo. They struck up a conversation with Hélène and chatted for a while. Obviously they had in common the fact that their children were different, that is why they noticed each other and began to converse. We learned that Théo had been adopted, he was fifteen months old when they brought him home from Thailand—his parents had died in the tsunami, along with all his brothers and sisters. I was looking around and thinking, how will he manage? Here we were at Angelina’s after all: all these well-dressed people, nibbling preciously at their exorbitantly priced patisserie, who were here only for . . . well, for the significance of the place itself—belonging to a certain world, with its beliefs, its codes, its projects, its history, and so on. It’s symbolic. When you go to have tea chez Angelina, you are in France, in a world that is wealthy, hierarchical, rational, Cartesian, policed. How will little Théo manage? He spent the first months of his life in a fishing village in Thailand, in an Eastern world dominated by its own values and emotions, where symbolic belonging might be played out at village feasts celebrating the Rain God, where children are brought up with magical beliefs, etc. And now here he is in France, at Angelina’s, suddenly immersed in a different culture without any time to adjust, with a social position that has changed in every possible way: from Asia to Europe, from poverty to wealth. Then suddenly I said to myself, Théo might want to burn cars some day. Because it’s a gesture of frustration and anger, and maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture, because you’ve been torn between cultures, cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don’t know where you are? What do you do if your culture will always be that of a Thai fishing village and of Parisian grands bourgeois at the same time? Or if you’re the son of immigrants but also the citizen of an old, conservative nation? So you burn cars, because when you have no culture, you’re no longer a civilized animal, you’re a wild beast. And a wild beast burns and kills and pillages.