PASCAL QUIGNARD  I immersed myself in it to write my next book, which is about death, addressing this simple question: why is death dressed up as a stay, a passage into another life? For every book, I need a piece of music. For this one, I found inspiration in a German Baroque composer whom I love, Johann Jakob Froberger, who composed a beautiful harpsichord piece called ‘Meditation on my Future Death’. I needed a piece of music and a painting. Ever since I started writing, at 18 years old, I have used little known, or even unknown, works as the background for what I write. I started with an essay on Délie, by Maurice Scève; then Paul Celan asked me to translate Alexandra, by the Greek poet Licofron. Recently I wrote an essay, Traité sur Esprit [Treatise on Esprit], for inclusion in a reissue of La Fausseté des vertus humaines [The Falsehood of Human Virtues], by the great 17th-century moralist Jacques Esprit, who was friends with La Rochefoucauld. Together they wanted to destroy the positive values of Christianity. Jacques Esprit, who wrote a huge book, is much less well known than La Rochefoucauld, who wrote a small book. I have always liked to draw attention to forgotten figures. Froberger travelled all over Europe at a time of conflict: the 17th-century French civil wars, known as Fronde. But there are other interesting things about him: he wanted to write a personal diary, which is common today but was rare back then; he also didn’t want to be published and did everything he could to avoid notoriety. Not having an audience was very important to him. I often play ‘Meditation on My Future Death’. It’s become part of my life now, since at the age of 77 I don’t have much longer to live. It’s a good topic that interests me. And the fact that I can hate death more than I love it also interests me, as does that Vatican fresco, which is so little known.

PQ  Through scholarly books on Tiresias. I know all the characters represented in the fresco. In the distance, you see the ship on the sea of mermaids arriving. For some reason, we don’t see the Sybil. I find this scene incredible – a representation of Roman hell, with the goddess of the underworld, Persephone, dipping her feet into the water. It’s completely different from Christian hell and that gave me pause. My interest is also linked to a personal circumstance. Every summer I go to the volcanic islands of the Bay of Naples: Ischia and Procida. I like volcanoes, the fact that they have emerged from a relationship with life on Earth. Why did the Romans place their heaven in the same spot as their hell? This is not what Christianity taught us at all.

PQ  Romans had their houses, their villas, in Naples. Augustus bought Ischia and then sold it to buy Capri. That’s where heaven was. But, at the same time, it was also the place where the Sybil welcomed Eneas and led him down to the sulphur-smelling underworld. When I write I always have a photograph of this fabulous fresco in front of me. A photograph that a psychoanalyst took for me.

PQ  I think so too. See, I found a little-known but beautiful image. It will look magnificent in the magazine, illustrating this interview. Don’t be afraid to cheat and saturate the colours. I beg you to use this image extravagantly, so that it looks sumptuous. I love it. Since it is not well known, it deserves to be shown. I think I answered your question, by mentioning these two things that I needed. They are two small conditions to meditate on my future death.

PQ  Yes, that’s true. But it is linked to a Christian tradition of death that we were all exposed to. I want to reflect on that. I was a devout choir boy. And I come from a family of organists. That’s a tradition of the Church: if you are not a priest, you are an organist. Organists know sacristies as well as priests do. But they don’t use them in the same way. There is a beautiful philosophical tradition that denies death, that says that you can’t experience it, therefore, you can’t say anything about it. From Epicurus to the Stoics, from Bergson to Blanchot. Then there’s a more recent tradition, of psychoanalysis, which saved me. I have suffered from depression and have had many struggles. I will firmly state that I was saved by psychoanalysis, in order to defend it, at a time when it is under attack and devalued. We favour psychiatrists and pills over psychoanalysts and reflection. For psychoanalysis, we live inside the ocean of our mothers. Birth – the natal scene – constitutes an unspeakable suffering, a change of regime, a revolution. Freud called it the ‘original loss’, which corresponds to a kind of death, a suffocation, as we pass from one world to the next. So, we experienced death at birth. The English psychoanalyst Winicott believed that whenever we suffer a nervous depression, we forget something that we have already experienced at birth. In short, philosophers say that we don’t experience death, while psychoanalysts say that we do. So, although Froberger says that his musical piece is about his future death, maybe it is just a lament about his past death.