Today I am leaving for France, homeland of ancestors, haven of art, house of gastronomy. I have long appreciated how the French refuse to pit logos against eros, rationality against sensuality, spirituality against physicality. The French do not want to pick this over that. They want it all. In Paris I will find a metropolitan menu featuring the French love of everything: Sorbonne and Moulin Rouge, Picasso and Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Toulouse Lautrec all feeling at home in the City of Lights, the capitol city of France.
Early on the trip I will arrive in Arles. Perhaps I will catch a glimpse of van Gogh’s ghost splashing the vibrant colors of astral and vegetal energy onto his now famous canvasses. Perhaps I will hear the roar of ancient sacramental bulls as I walk past the arena. Perhaps I will hear the faint scrape of Pope Clement V’s slippers as we walk the halls of the papal palace in Avignon. Perhaps I will hear the heavy footed cadence of Hannibal’s elephants as his army marches south through Provence.
The French are fans of fermentation, fruit fermented into wine, milk fermented into cheese, ideas fermented into radical thought and even revolution. What others might interpret as spoilage, the French interpret as Joie de vivre, the joy of life. Think Camembert. Think Roquefort. Think Brie. Think Robespierre, Rousseau. Think Lafayette who helped we Americans win our own fermentation called the Revolutionary War.
So I am looking forward to being among a people who are as stirred by a fine wine as they are by a fine idea. I hope their respect for fermentation will rub off on me and I will come home ripened and ready for work.
Stay tuned!