The other day I called him red-white, and I am not absolutely unfair to him: there is a curious Michel Onfray, who is very curious, who I do not agree with the cancellation of his entire journey that degrades in age and, above all, as he goes up. In this way, I still have in mind some of the works of Onfray, Politique du rebelle, which remains and continues to be a reference. In addition, it has a recently created booklet, 2019, in which degradation began. It is called Le chemin de la Garenne and, with the excuse of a return for the people in which he grew up, he speaks of the memory, of the past, of childhood, of the wear caused by time.
Start by saying that there is no path that will not lead anywhere (Miguel Sánchez Ostiz would add that it is something else if you know where that path is going). In fact, a road has to go to that destination, and this road from Garenne takes us just backwards in time: it goes through the house where its father was, goes through the cemetery where the fame is located, where the author would like to be buried, and goes through the place where his father died, who died in his arms. The working-class orchards have disappeared, one of them his father's orchards, due to his order and discipline, was the philosophy the child Onfray received and the lesson of wisdom. The gas station has disappeared, in which Onfray, a teenager, worked for a while – when the factory closed, silence was installed in the village. And a building that meant his intellectual awakening disappears, where he learned to read, to write, to tell, to school. What memories do you have to keep from all these memories? “The road of Garenne that is in me is not dead, and that’s what matters.”
There is therefore no way to go anywhere. You just have to know where the road is going or dare to discover it.