Yves Quéré, a physicist, was professor and curriculum director at the École polytechnique. A member of the Academy of Sciences, he participated with Georges Charpak and Pierre Léna in the “La main à la pâte” program of renovation in teaching. He is the author of several books also published by Editions Odile Jacob.

“Our lives are profuse. Profuse in joys and in sorrows, in victories and in retreats, in failures and in accomplishments, fashioned by our ideas, our actions, our plans, our deeds and our misdeeds, our flights, and our falls, sometimes our betrayals…

They might – written in a language that is out of the ordinary – be compared to a symphony, itself the effigy of a passing of time, and thus of duration…

These songs, these fleeting and quickly disappearing melodies, the idea might then come to listen to them again during a wandering stroll; and to fixate on some of them in the variegated order in which they arise.

Below you will find nothing other than that.” Y. Q.

Near Beirut, at the gates of Syria, in the Paris metro, or in a provincial high school, we follow Yves Quéré in his intellectual and poetic wandering about everything and nothing: music which initiates us into the complexity of thought; the superfluous use of the superlative; the new craze of classifying; the complicit connections of science and art; “courses in ignorance;” the lessons we don’t receive and those that are given too easily…

Behind what Yves Quéré nicely calls the “streaking” of life are perceived a few solid convictions: the importance of the beautiful, the unshakable confidence in humanity, an unwavering thirst to know….