As an adolescent, Emmanuel Carrère was unhappy, but he remained buoyant because he believed in the two assets he trusted above all others: his intellect and his identity as a writer. Intelligence served as his life raft. Irony gave him distance from despair. Even misery becomes manageable when you can narrate it with style.
That strategy collapsed when he turned thirty.
The faculties that had once sustained him simply stopped working. He could no longer marshal his intelligence against himself. Reflecting on that period, he writes, “I could no longer write, I didn’t know how to love, I knew I wasn’t particularly likable. Just being me became literally unbearable.”
He had reached what might be called a collapse of competence: the moment when the qualities that once anchored your identity—talent, discipline, intelligence, status, creativity, charm—suddenly fail to hold your weight. The scaffolding of the self buckles. You are forced to search for an entirely different foundation because the old one has become a condemned building.
When Carrère confessed his misery to his godmother Jacqueline, he expected sympathy. Instead, she was delighted.
As a devout Catholic, she believed despair was not a catastrophe but a prerequisite. Only when a person finally recognizes that his life has become an uninhabitable ruin is he prepared to hear the Gospel. Pride must first exhaust itself.
She placed a New Testament in his hands and instructed him to read it without trying to be “too intelligent.”
That advice carries a sly paradox. Intelligence, the very faculty Carrère had relied upon for survival, had become the obstacle. Jacqueline was asking him to stop treating the Bible as a puzzle to master and instead allow it to master him.
During that same summer of 1990, Jacqueline introduced Emmanuel to her other godson, Hervé. The two men gradually became close friends.
Hervé was, by temperament, a philosopher disguised as a journalist. Though professionally successful, he was perpetually haunted by questions that most people manage to outrun. Why are we here? What is life for? Is there some purpose behind our existence, or are we simply decorating a cosmic waiting room until the lights go out?
Watching Hervé, Carrère concludes that humanity divides rather neatly into two camps.
The first group rarely loses sleep over metaphysical questions. They pursue promotions, vacations, romance, gossip, consumer pleasures, status games, and the endless sport of comparing themselves to everyone else. Their calendars stay full enough to prevent existential reflection from getting a word in edgewise.
The second group cannot escape those questions. They are pursued by them like debt collectors. They read philosophy and religion not because such books are fashionable but because they are desperate. They are trying to determine whether existence contains an author or merely an audience.
Looking back years later, Carrère recognizes that Hervé’s spiritual curiosity had been quietly cultivated by Jacqueline, who gently nudged him toward Christianity. Their religious journeys eventually diverged, but their friendship endured.
For decades they have gathered regularly in the Swiss village of Le Levron, spending time together in a chalet that Carrère calls his querencia.
The Spanish word comes from bullfighting. A querencia is the part of the arena where the bull instinctively retreats because it feels secure there. It is the place from which the animal regains its strength before reentering the fight.
For Carrère, the metaphor is perfect. He arrives troubled and leaves restored.
Everyone should have a reliable querencia.
Mine, during the 1970s, was Walt’s Gym, a converted chicken coop perfumed with ancient sweat, rust, and enough menthol muscle ointment to fumigate a county. Men joyfully abused their bodies in pursuit of impossible physiques while punctuating every set with gossip, insults, bad jokes, and elaborate storytelling. It was less a fitness center than a monastery dedicated to testosterone and nonsense. The barbells built muscle. The banter built men.
Then the corporate gyms arrived.
The chicken coop gave way to chrome, televisions, smoothie bars, biometric scanners, and motivational slogans printed by people who had clearly never deadlifted anything heavier than a marketing proposal. By 2005 I had had enough. I quit.
For the past twenty years my querencia has been my garage.
There I swing kettlebells, flood my brain with an hour’s worth of endorphins, keep company with favorite podcasters, and temporarily escape the increasingly exhausting experience of being myself. I enter carrying the accumulated static of the world. I leave feeling that someone has quietly reset my nervous system.
I envy Carrère because his querencia involves another human being.
Mine is solitary.
There was a time when it wasn’t.
During the late 1980s a group of us played basketball at a Berkeley community center before heading out for dinner. Those evenings stitched together a sense of belonging that no amount of solitary reflection could duplicate.
Later, after moving from the Bay Area to the California desert for my first teaching job, loneliness became my regular companion. Once each week I would spend two-hour marathons on the telephone with old friends. By the end my ear literally hurt from holding the receiver.
Those conversations nourished me in ways I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Someone had willingly given me two hours of his life. That simple fact quietly testified that I mattered.
Then phone conversations disappeared in the early 2000s.
Texting replaced talking. Social media replaced lingering conversation. We became experts at remaining connected while carefully avoiding communion.
So today my querencia is almost entirely solitary.
Yet I continue to experience what I think of as the Querencia Effect: the restorative power of a place, ritual, or recurring practice that allows someone to arrive emotionally depleted and leave psychologically renewed. It is the sanctuary where a fractured self is quietly reassembled before returning to the arena.
Still, I worry.
As I approach sixty-five, my refuge depends almost entirely upon a body that grows older every year. One day it may no longer tolerate sixty-minute kettlebell sessions or long rides that leave me happily awash in endorphins.
I think of a bodybuilder I once read in a muscle magazine. His ambition was beautifully uncomplicated. He wanted only one thing from God: the privilege of lifting weights for as long as he remained alive.
Then I think of Ronnie Coleman.
No professional bodybuilder punished himself more ferociously. His reward has been dozens of back surgeries and chronic pain that would persuade most people never to enter another gym.
Yet there he is, sometimes maneuvering through the weight room in a wheelchair because, pain or no pain, he still needs to touch the iron.
Some dependencies are pathological.
Others are redemptive.
The difficulty is that the line between them often becomes visible only after it has been crossed.
Years ago I had a colleague who was, in his own eccentric way, a genius. He ignored lesson plans, dismissed required evaluations with cheerful contempt, wore the same uniform of white T-shirt and blue jeans, and simply walked into class and talked. Students adored him. Passing me on campus, he would grin and greet me with a sarcastic profanity, as though the world’s absurdity deserved nothing more sophisticated.
I attended his retirement party in 2004.
A few years later I learned he had taken his own life.
Cannabis had become his querencia. When a medical diagnosis made it impossible for him to continue using it, the refuge disappeared. Without it, life became intolerable. His wife found him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
That story has haunted me for years because it exposes an uncomfortable truth.
We eventually become dependent upon the very things that rescue us.
If tomorrow my body informed me that I could never exercise again, I don’t believe I would follow my colleague’s path.
The first reason is simple: I love my wife and daughters more than I love my own comfort. The collateral damage would be unforgivable.
The second reason is considerably less noble.
I am a coward.
Cowardice, on occasion, has surprising moral utility. It keeps a person from making irreversible decisions during temporary despair.
Besides, the last thing I want is to arrive before God having chosen the emergency exit, only to be asked why I abandoned the arena before the fight was over. There are many questions I would like to avoid on Judgment Day.
That is certainly one of them.
