Back to Provence - Travel
The difference for the passenger between a first visit and again is crucial. To "return" is not "go". Yet, old, familiar places to keep a kind of magic, and especially when memories are shared. For our 40th anniversary year of marriage, my wife, Elena, and I went back to where our marriage began: the South of France. We planned to visit old haunts, the area we once called home. Then we had all the time in the world, now we have a week. Too, there is a difference between 20-somethings living on a shoestring budget and tourists "a certain age" who stay in nice hotels.
"Let's do it right this time," I said. "Let's fly to Nice and to stay where we could not do before. Let's walk Down Memory Lane."
As newlyweds, honeymoon extended by one year, we had lived in the keeper's cottage in a beautiful old farm in Opio, near Grasse. The postman was coming on a scooter, spraying laces of the aisle, the cart was drawn by farm horses. When the mistral was blowing in the winter, the view from the heights of Cannes Corsica revealed the coal stove in the kitchen gave little hot water or heat. Opio now has a Club Med with a spa and a supermarket moved the butcher and baker, a golf course replaced the groves. And "our" property belongs to the Earl of Spencer, with locked doors and manicured lawns and pool.
It is difficult to know, in the wake of Heisenberg and Einstein, which is absolute, relative, and why. Should we change as witnesses, or is it that the change we are witnessing, or both does not change due to viewing, and it is our estimate altered by the awareness of view? Think of a railway and the train, the world goes through while we sit still, or is it vice versa? These problems of philosophy and mathematics are also riddles personal was it always like that, and we do not notice? Because we have changed more than the landscape, no matter how people complain that the landscape has changed.
"The young and the poor," said Elena. "Old and secure. That's us. "
Nice airport was expanded and modernized, but you do not exit in the market of flowers and tree-lined streets with cafes. Instead there is the "rush" of modernity, and we drove away from him, as if from any airport, not the one who clings to the border of the bright Mediterranean. Most of the old roads are clotted with cars, some have been reconfigured with the pace slows-roundabouts. It's like the memory, really: the sudden dips and stops and circles, with speed bumps that ply the streets. The village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence - sleepy and quiet the first time I saw it - has become a kind of Mecca for pilgrims and tour bus on foot. Fondation Maeght outside its walls contains the work of Braque, Chagall, Giacometti and other artists who made the home region. Bonnard, Matisse and Picasso lived in the area too, and many of them arrived in the south, at the invitation of Paul Roux, a hotelier who says, in effect, "Stay with me for the weekend and leave behind a painting or sculpture in exchange for a good meal and a bed. "
It was a brilliant arrangement, and the garden of La Colombe d'Or shows an installation by Fernand Leger, inside, there are drawings and paintings everywhere, with Alexander Calder enrolled in at least two "Mrs. . Roux "The artists are gone, the art remains. And somehow all viewing gets superimposed on a previous one, so that the garden is filled with ghosts. Now, standing before the abduction Light, I remember doing when was still a child and next to my mother. After his death, I found a travel journal she had kept on the trip: "Only in France you eat well," she writes, after lunch La Colombe d'Or.
We also ate there with my wife's parents on the eve of the first New Year of our marriage. Both of them were passing and offered us to host a drawing at a fixed price dinner party: many courses, much Champagne. The first of the dishes was locked woodcock sauce, and my mother-in-law - a devoted birder and member of the Audubon Society - has lost his appetite. We spent the night consoling her, assuring that the woodcock was handled gently and thoroughly cooked. Our own meals, some 40 years later, was a bit less dramatic, and we ate a basket of fresh vegetables and snails and rabbit blood sauce, but left the birds alone. I missed the chance at a bottle of Chateau d'Yquem (550 euros, or about $ 788 to 1.43 dollar per euro) for a cheap wine locally. ...
Which was what we used to drink in quantity, and often with the expatriate author James Baldwin. I met him briefly before, and serendipitously in line at American Express office in Cannes, and we became fast friends. It was the year Baldwin lived in self-imposed exile on La Route de la Colle, just below St. Paul de Vence. Across the road, above the place we parked to go into a property of Baldwin, I would see an advertisement for The Hamlet, inviting travelers in. But our own house was a dark disc, away and at midnight tipsily rear fascia past with the insouciance of youth, we never stayed in the hotel.
Now for the first two nights of our trip, The Hamlet was where we slept. The "Hamlet" buildings are beautifully landscaped, and the reception staff were friendly. Baldwin Home was abandoned, however, and it is now available: a pile of stones, where a melancholy time we laughed and talked. To see the tiles looted and the windows boarded up (although he died long ago, in 1987) was contemplating wreck and think Les Neiges d'Antan.
"Let's do it right this time," I said. "Let's fly to Nice and to stay where we could not do before. Let's walk Down Memory Lane."
As newlyweds, honeymoon extended by one year, we had lived in the keeper's cottage in a beautiful old farm in Opio, near Grasse. The postman was coming on a scooter, spraying laces of the aisle, the cart was drawn by farm horses. When the mistral was blowing in the winter, the view from the heights of Cannes Corsica revealed the coal stove in the kitchen gave little hot water or heat. Opio now has a Club Med with a spa and a supermarket moved the butcher and baker, a golf course replaced the groves. And "our" property belongs to the Earl of Spencer, with locked doors and manicured lawns and pool.
It is difficult to know, in the wake of Heisenberg and Einstein, which is absolute, relative, and why. Should we change as witnesses, or is it that the change we are witnessing, or both does not change due to viewing, and it is our estimate altered by the awareness of view? Think of a railway and the train, the world goes through while we sit still, or is it vice versa? These problems of philosophy and mathematics are also riddles personal was it always like that, and we do not notice? Because we have changed more than the landscape, no matter how people complain that the landscape has changed.
"The young and the poor," said Elena. "Old and secure. That's us. "
Nice airport was expanded and modernized, but you do not exit in the market of flowers and tree-lined streets with cafes. Instead there is the "rush" of modernity, and we drove away from him, as if from any airport, not the one who clings to the border of the bright Mediterranean. Most of the old roads are clotted with cars, some have been reconfigured with the pace slows-roundabouts. It's like the memory, really: the sudden dips and stops and circles, with speed bumps that ply the streets. The village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence - sleepy and quiet the first time I saw it - has become a kind of Mecca for pilgrims and tour bus on foot. Fondation Maeght outside its walls contains the work of Braque, Chagall, Giacometti and other artists who made the home region. Bonnard, Matisse and Picasso lived in the area too, and many of them arrived in the south, at the invitation of Paul Roux, a hotelier who says, in effect, "Stay with me for the weekend and leave behind a painting or sculpture in exchange for a good meal and a bed. "
It was a brilliant arrangement, and the garden of La Colombe d'Or shows an installation by Fernand Leger, inside, there are drawings and paintings everywhere, with Alexander Calder enrolled in at least two "Mrs. . Roux "The artists are gone, the art remains. And somehow all viewing gets superimposed on a previous one, so that the garden is filled with ghosts. Now, standing before the abduction Light, I remember doing when was still a child and next to my mother. After his death, I found a travel journal she had kept on the trip: "Only in France you eat well," she writes, after lunch La Colombe d'Or.
We also ate there with my wife's parents on the eve of the first New Year of our marriage. Both of them were passing and offered us to host a drawing at a fixed price dinner party: many courses, much Champagne. The first of the dishes was locked woodcock sauce, and my mother-in-law - a devoted birder and member of the Audubon Society - has lost his appetite. We spent the night consoling her, assuring that the woodcock was handled gently and thoroughly cooked. Our own meals, some 40 years later, was a bit less dramatic, and we ate a basket of fresh vegetables and snails and rabbit blood sauce, but left the birds alone. I missed the chance at a bottle of Chateau d'Yquem (550 euros, or about $ 788 to 1.43 dollar per euro) for a cheap wine locally. ...
Which was what we used to drink in quantity, and often with the expatriate author James Baldwin. I met him briefly before, and serendipitously in line at American Express office in Cannes, and we became fast friends. It was the year Baldwin lived in self-imposed exile on La Route de la Colle, just below St. Paul de Vence. Across the road, above the place we parked to go into a property of Baldwin, I would see an advertisement for The Hamlet, inviting travelers in. But our own house was a dark disc, away and at midnight tipsily rear fascia past with the insouciance of youth, we never stayed in the hotel.
Now for the first two nights of our trip, The Hamlet was where we slept. The "Hamlet" buildings are beautifully landscaped, and the reception staff were friendly. Baldwin Home was abandoned, however, and it is now available: a pile of stones, where a melancholy time we laughed and talked. To see the tiles looted and the windows boarded up (although he died long ago, in 1987) was contemplating wreck and think Les Neiges d'Antan.
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