France
These are
the fields I've driven across so many times before.
The nineteenth of August... northern view. finally alone,
I write to you: Love rules my life.
THE 5th LEG OF THE EUROWALK - FRANCE
A
thousand feet above the Channel coast. Cherbourg.
Host to the haunting memory of indigo and dusty rose and times
I rode on the Continent... burning autumn leaves in
late
September... aroma in a biker's wind.
Then late for school I would tear myself from France.
And
now I reënter the spell, on foot - hushedly, and with
reverence for the trance.. Stendhal, Balzac, Debussy
and Ravel, Voltaire, Molière, Robespierre and Racine,
Rodin, Renoir, Proust and Monet. Camille Corot
and the
road before me. D87 a two lane blacktop south and
east to Byzantium...
To
be with Jean Rhys in Paris, or to drink with Joyce when he
came through that town. to tour with Montaigne and
Bridget Bardot, LeCorbusier's Ronchamp, Azay le Rideau,
O
I could tell of days of intoxication
with France:
an
orchard near Aurillac, curve of the river Yonne,
the
grass we danced on at Rambouillet behind
the
King's chateau. "Here, There, and Everywhere"
had
just been released...
I sang at the old Olympia on the Boulevard des Malesherbes before they
tore it down.
I've
ridden in rain on my BMW by the Porte de Clignancourt.
We sang at night on the sidewalk "Select Latin," at a racetrack
in Paris where Degas painted and a hundred thousand
France came for each of two nights.. I have skied
with the students at Les Deux Alpes . brandy and moonlight.
peace in the Midi . and in the Ardêche mountains an
antique simplicity... we sang on the boardwalk
with Kathy in Nice under the stars in Sixty-five
and used the francs we made to eat..
the Frenchman I most got to know was Rousseau -
I see him as an orphan boy in the high Savoy...
I
have seen my own life pass in France, since Sixty-two in
old Combray . my own Swann's way.
Blasé to the Norman land today, I muse: How like Odette
was Laurie Bird - naughty and gorgeous.
Written walking through France
Copyright
@ Arthur Garfunkel
Used by Permission of Author. All Rights Reserved.
