"We were in the middle of the 2007 presidential election, with [Ségolène] Royal versus [Nicolas] Sarkozy, and the debates were particularly tense and stormy. I was fervently following the campaign, thanks especially to Le Monde, which at that time I was reading in print. I live in downtown Tours, central France, in an old 15th-century house. One day, I left the parking lot as usual and dropped into the newsagent to pick up the paper to take home.
I was standing on the side of the road with my nose buried in the political pages, and still absorbed in my reading, was about to cross Rue Nationale, when suddenly, I was forcefully pulled backward by my backpack. Thinking I was being attacked, I clenched my fists and turned around to be confronted by the smiling face of a man staring back at me. In that instant, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a blue shadow and felt something brush past my shoulder – it was a bus.
The man simply smiled at me but said nothing – not a word. I thanked him profusely, and then he crossed the road and disappeared into the crowd. It was over. He'd saved my life. I was stunned and didn't even have the presence of mind to catch up with him and offer him a drink.
I find it difficult to express the effect this incident has had on me. I had been enclosed in my bubble of self-absorption – as I might have been today while staring at the screen of my smartphone – but what set of circumstances brought this man to my side, attentive to others and open to the world, unlike me? Was he aware that he had saved my life? Did he feel it? Had I been sufficiently grateful?
What's miraculous about that brief moment is how much mystery and chance were involved. Nine years ago, my wife and I adopted a little boy. Although his arrival could be described as a miracle, it wasn't for us, because it had been our will to set the whole process in motion, which of course, involved huge love and emotion, but it was our doing.
Now, thanks to this unknown person, something else has taken root in me. When I'm worried about someone I care about, I think of that moment and how quickly an accident can happen and how important it is to look out for others. I told this story to my now ten-year-old son and presented it to him as a miracle. 'It's extraordinary,' I told him, 'that someone should have been watching out for me when I wasn't paying attention to myself or others.'
From the beginning of this century, I have become increasingly aware that fewer and fewer things constitute society. We're withdrawing; individualism is triumphing, we are living in small groups and we're experiencing an institutional crisis. I'm not exonerating myself from this trend – in fact, I'm sometimes completely carried away by it. I genuinely thought that Covid would be the catharsis that would reunite society, but it had the opposite effect. Covid accelerated the loss of our civic sense. We are locked up in our own bubbles more than ever. That split-second moment 16 years ago, was a moment of grace. It was tangible proof of the humanity and benevolence that despite everything, still runs through society."
You have 5% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.