Life as a joke

“Man reaches maturity when he takes life with the same seriousness as a child takes a game”: I’m watching my daughter when Nietzsche’s phrase comes to mind. She is sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by colored blocks, dolls, bottle caps and flowers that we brought from the street; she is so serious in her play, exactly as in Nietzsche’s phrase, exactly as children are.

I’m very little Nietzschean today, and it’s on those days that I find myself thinking more about the philosopher’s aphorisms – of course, in my Nietzschean days, I don’t need Nietzsche. It’s like the days when I’m calm and therefore don’t need to meditate. My mother says that only restless and anxious people do meditation and yoga. That if I take my wooden stool, sit down, close my eyes and say “ommm”, it’s because things are bad. Generally, it is.

I look at my daughter some more. At first, the colored blocks have nothing to do with the dolls, which don’t match the caps, which have nothing to do with the flowers we brought from the street. But none of that matters, of course: she is not concerned with the importance of anything. On the contrary, she is there, absurdly committed to the unimportant, putting together the objects she wants to put together. That’s why, later on, she’ll take her colored pencil case and draw with the greatest concentration in the world, and then she’ll show me the drawings with the greatest concentration in the world, but then she’ll leave the drawings all over the house without the slightest embarrassment: the leaves had been essential to her for as long as they had been essential to her, and not for a second longer.

My daughter gets irritated when I don’t play along. When I say, for example, that the doll’s soup is going to get cold, forgetting that the doll is not eating soup, but ice cream. The other day, she was playing with the dollhouse, and:

“I’m this one, okay,” I said, plucking the doll from the cardboard chair.
– Wait, mom, now he’s having dinner!! – she replied, seriously. Seriously.

On the other hand, it’s interesting how she You know that the joke is a joke. If, for example, I say that it’s time for dinner, the real dinner, not the dolls’ dinner, she asks me: “Just five more minutes, mom”. Only ask for five more minutes to dine who is aware that dinner is out of the question; she knows there is play and there is no play, she knows that play is not life. But that knowledge doesn’t stop her from taking the game deeply seriously. It is like the actor, who, when acting, is and is not acting. I had a drama teacher who insisted on reminding the class:

– You are totally taken by the character, your world is the character’s world, but if the stage catches fire, run!

We adults know how to do this, of course. When we are sucked into a good novel or movie, we know that we are immersed in an aesthetic illusion, but this knowledge does not make our dive any less wet. We’re in tears because of the character’s death, an annoying guy tries to calm us down by saying it’s just a movie, and we continue crying, and still angry at the annoying guy, hurt by his disrespect, with his callous attempt to pull our little doll out of the chair. cardboard.

I take seriously the fun of movies, books, fantasies I invent and also laughter, long conversations, sex, running in the park, conversations with no time to end. But what about outside of these moments? What would that be like, taking life as seriously as a child takes a game?

I help my daughter put away the blocks. After the game, I prepare our real dinner, give her a real bath, sing her to sleep for real. Time passes quickly, as it does whenever I manage to experience motherhood more in terms of the mother I wanted to be when I was a girl, and not the professional mother fear of the uncertain future schedule full head even more than I am sometimes.

Nothing is further from facing life as a game than fear of an uncertain future and full schedules, I think, slowly closing the door to her room.

Liliane Prata is CLAUDIA’s editor and writes weekly here on the site. To speak with her, send an email to liliane.prata@