L'humeur vagabonde (12/31 - repeat)Voix off includes a CD that complements this audio autobiography and includes texts read by Roland Barthes and the voices of his own family.
"Could there be a more treasured place, safer shelter, a more peaceful retreat than a recording studio? Enclosed on all sides, covered, sitting in front of a single microphone, outloud - without making an effort to project, in the medium - for two or three hours, I read the pages of a book. The world becomes the one in this book. The world is in the book. The world is the book. The lives that I'm with, the dead that I mourn, the time that passes, the era of which I'm a contemporary, the story that unfolds, the air that I breathe, belong to the book. I enter into the reading. Nacelle or bathyscaphe, the small windowless room where I enclose myself permits a total immersion or ascension. We descend into the depths of the book, climb to a language sky. I leave it to the voice to represent me entirely. Written and read words serve as perfect existence. But with my voice, reading the words of another, those of someone long gone, whose flesh has evaporated, but whose style, the beauty of this style, triggers a world of echos, of connections and living voices through which I pass, speaking in turn, entering into these voices, surrendering myself to daydreaming, to the specific action of continuous daydreaming, parallel and free, I know that I'm speaking, I know that it is me, not in the text, of course, but in the enunciation of these pages. And so other voices make themselves heard, in mine."
