"The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world"
About this Quote
There is a quiet ruthlessness in Simenon calling the lake and mountains his "real world". It’s a line that sounds like pastoral gratitude, but it’s also a declaration of secession: from cities, from chatter, from the social performance that so often props up identity. Simenon, a writer obsessed with what people hide and how they rationalize their lives, isn’t just praising scenery. He’s choosing a jurisdiction.
The phrasing matters. "Have become" suggests a conversion rather than a preference, as if the natural world didn’t merely please him but took over, crowding out the manufactured realities of reputation, deadline, scandal, and noise. "My landscape" is possessive, almost proprietary; he’s arranging the external world the way a novelist arranges a set, selecting what counts as background and what gets to be foreground. Then he sharpens it with "my real world", a loaded phrase from a writer who spent a career showing how "reality" is often a story we tell ourselves to survive.
Context adds bite. Simenon was famously prolific, restlessly mobile, and often morally unsentimental. Retreating to lakes and mountains reads less like escapism than a bid for clarity: a controlled environment where human drama can be observed at a distance, stripped to essentials. The subtext is that society is the hallucination and solitude is the truth. It’s not romantic nature worship; it’s a writer staking out the conditions under which he can see people clearly enough to dissect them.
The phrasing matters. "Have become" suggests a conversion rather than a preference, as if the natural world didn’t merely please him but took over, crowding out the manufactured realities of reputation, deadline, scandal, and noise. "My landscape" is possessive, almost proprietary; he’s arranging the external world the way a novelist arranges a set, selecting what counts as background and what gets to be foreground. Then he sharpens it with "my real world", a loaded phrase from a writer who spent a career showing how "reality" is often a story we tell ourselves to survive.
Context adds bite. Simenon was famously prolific, restlessly mobile, and often morally unsentimental. Retreating to lakes and mountains reads less like escapism than a bid for clarity: a controlled environment where human drama can be observed at a distance, stripped to essentials. The subtext is that society is the hallucination and solitude is the truth. It’s not romantic nature worship; it’s a writer staking out the conditions under which he can see people clearly enough to dissect them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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