to Lynda & Sophie
gszopamonley
Thank you for reading this.
And your thoughts. Delicate enough.
In France, the calendar is very catholic and each day of the year celebrates
its own saint. But as we all know
there are no such things as saints or devils.
I do think though that first names, especially for women, and for men too
we do know they inherit their father's last name, identity, identity),
are important words that should be remembered and celebrated.
So thank you very much.
Take good care of yourself.
Geneviève
Redclay 6
there are no such things as saints or devils.>>
whats this "we" bidness?
sophie
>But as we all know
>there are no such things as saints or devils.>>
>
>whats this "we" bidness?
first person plural.
--
sophie
ever-helpful
Lynda
i'm confused now.
L.
Redclay 6
fust person, them, plural.
its hard to stay in, sometime, an behave.
but what did i fine tother day, but
laurent perrier grand siecle, 1990.
an the boy was bout givin em away.
so, chopin an good cheese, pro-squitti,
blood oranges, franch bret, plugra
(butter dippt in bacon fat), peecans,
an wine so good, the guy kept
passin out ever time he tried to dayscribe it.
an what did i pull out to read,again, but a
story from the wall street journals editorial page.
dec 27, "reconstruction". mark helprin.
you can, you need to read thisun.
" "Until that day," he told me when he was old, "I had not seen gratitude, or
joy,
or grief. If God, in remembering His work, had decided to replicate the glory
of creation, He might have done so in the liberation of Paris. That's what it
was like." "
a squat bell of green glass an gold foil,
with a swans neck.
wuth ever penny jus to watch the bubbles storm the surface.
Redclay 6
Commentary
Reconstruction
By Mark Helprin. Mr. Helprin, a novelist and contributing editor of the
Journal, is the author of "Memoir From Antproof Case," "Winter's Tale," "A
Soldier of the Great War," "Ellis Island & Other Stories" and other books.
The most difficult of the dinner parties I ruin are usually around Christmas,
and always those of the younger members of the firm, who, no matter how well
they have done, have yet to find their place because they have yet to fall from
grace and restore themselves. They know I have built and rebuilt, that, quite
apart from my military history, I have, in corporate terms, come back from the
dead. That very thing, though I did not ask for it, is what
they fear the most to get and fear the most in me.
It is why, while I sit still and merely smile, they hold forth in a volume of
words that would blow up a tire. You would think that because they talk as
enthusiastically as talking dogs, they would win. While they say everything, I
say nothing. I am shown the second-tier paintings, and harried children who can
play Mendelssohn, and from the corner of my eye I see the ineluctable Range
Rovers, the Viking stoves, and the flower boxes perfectly tended
by silent Peruvians with broken hearts.
Still, I win, they lose, and I couldn't throw the game even if I tried. They
just don't know. They're younger than my sons and daughter. I find their claims
embarrassing: I don't care where they went to college; I don't even care where
I went to college. I want only to spy the youthful graces they cannot see in
themselves, and encourage them to do well and spend more time with their
children than I spent with mine. They won't. I didn't. They can't. I
couldn't.
"We've just come back from Venice," said the lady of the house, the wife of one
of our foremost earners. He is less than 30 years old, and she is stunningly
beautiful and looks 18.
"He knows," her husband said, "he sent me."
Her answer to this cruelty was "oh." But that was not the end of it. Thinking
that something was sure to follow, I sat there like the Sphinx. Unlike the
Sphinx, however, I acknowledged with my eyes that she was alive.
"Do you know Venice?" she asked. I saw that I was now a strategical point in
her troubled marriage. "What with the dollar so high, it's like Disneyland.
There are more Americans than in New Jersey."
"Americans don't live in New Jersey anymore," her husband added, "and they
actually wear mouse ears. I saw them."
"Sometimes," she qualified. "Sometimes they wear mouse ears, some of them. Have
you been there?" she pressed, turning toward me as slowly as the aft turret on
the Missouri.
"Yes, I have."
"When?" she inquired, as insistently as the Bronx District Attorney.
Thinking of the bayonet that had once been at the end of my rifle, I picked up
my butter knife, and then returned it to the damasked table cloth. "Right after
the war."
"The Gulf War?" she asked.
I must have looked incredulous that she would not understand which war "the
war" was.
"Vietnam?"
"I don't think so."
"What war?"
"Alicia," her husband said severely, because she had had three glasses of
champagne, and because, of the long list of names by which the world knows our
firm, mine is the only one that belongs to someone living.
"I want to know, Jared." When she pronounced his name she did so as if she
didn't care for it, and then she looked up at me like a woman with whom you
have been arguing and whom you are about to kiss, and she said, "Which one,
babycakes?"
"The Second World War," I answered. "World War Two." I did want to kiss her.
"Well you can't possibly remember the Second World War," she said. "How old are
you?"
"I was born in nineteen forty two," I told her. Here I was, talking, I who am
famous for sitting through social engagements like a ghost. "I was in Venice in
'forty six, when I was four, and I remember everything. I remember the weave of
the towels in the bathroom of the hotel. I remember the color of the paint on
the iron chair on which I sat one day in the Piazza San Marco -- it was green
-- and the shape of the dish in which I had yoghurt and
sugar. I remember the pigeon that lit upon the balcony, the slate gray and
iridescent purple of his neck feathers. His eyes jumped when an ocean liner
just outside the Grand Canal blew its whistle and scattered every bird in
Venice but him. He stayed put, strutting like a pigeon. I wore a compass on a
lanyard, and carried a rubber hunting knife in a cardboard sheath, in case
there were any wild animals."
Just as I realized that I was really building up to something -- and I really
was -- my wife broke in with her accustomed diplomatic skill and turned the
conversation to the reconstruction of Venice, to the floods in Florence, and to
the restoration of wetted works of art in general. To make the break invisible
she informed them of my ability to pull from the past the most extraordinary
details of memory, saying with no apparent bitterness, "That's
the part of his life that is most vivid. If you lose him in your conferences,
look for him there." Now these people had become strategical points in our
marriage, and though I cared, I drifted. I lost them, they lost me, voices
faded, and the room became pale.
***
In its stead, reconstituted before my eyes as if it actually existed, was a
glass of amber-colored scotch, what I now know to be a double, on a white
tablecloth next to my father's dinner plate. We were in Venice, in a restaurant
where everyone had to shout. In October 1946, my chin just cleared the table. I
looked up like a cat at the glasses and plates, at the dishes and bowls and
bottles that arrived or were taken away with surprising speed and a
musical clinking. The room was bright, hot, and full of smoke, and women at
other tables wore shoulderless gowns in what seemed to be a cloth of gold.
I can put the scene in order now from what my father told me long after and
from what I have come to know myself. Although he was relatively young and
worked for someone else, he and his friends were bankers and money men,
American, English, and French, not long separated from their wartime units,
investing in broken enterprises that they chanced would revive. My father put
everything we had, which wasn't a lot, and much more of other people's money
that, were it lost, would have dragged him down for the rest of his life, into
businesses that had suffered the destruction of their plant, the death and
dislocation of their workers, and the disappearance of their markets. "They
have no factory," he would say. "The railroad was destroyed. The roads were
bombed. And the canals are full of explosives. But what is important is their
habit of mind. What is important is the high probability that
civilization, having come undone, will repair itself." Though at the time it
hardly seemed possible, he believed that Europe must be restored.
We had driven to Venice through Germany, Austria, and the Veneto. Because of
that drive I thought that Paris, where we lived, was an island in a world of
rubble. Whole cities were represented merely by blackened chimneys standing
like fired trees on a savannah of brick and broken stone. And the few buildings
that remained were like wounded animals, pockmarked and cracked, their
balconies hanging by what seemed like threads. Refugees choked the roads,
and military convoys passed with precedence.
My father and I were alone and had left my mother at home, the object of this
being that I would by knowing my father gravitate less toward protecting my
mother from him after, having invaded Europe, he had invaded our household. I
met him only when I was three and had grown quite comfortable with the idea
that he was a symbolic figure. This was our first time alone, and though I
liked him I was convinced neither of his value nor his legitimacy. When
he kissed me his beard was like sharkskin and his mustache like thorns.
Although my mother may have been, I was not impressed that he looked like
Ronald Colman. That my parents had had their difficulties was not surprising:
they had not been able to touch or speak from February of 1942 to December of
1945, just short of four years. Without knowing it, I was the reason for the
continuance of their marriage, and had become its strategical point.
Evidently, a marriage without a strategical point is like a rhinoceros without
a horn.
Late for me, perhaps at ten or so, the end of the dinner ended a torrent of
words about business and politics that I could not fathom even though they were
English, and my father and I broke out into the night air. The sky in Venice is
too often the color of the Financial Times, but that night it was laden with
stars. A wind blew steadily over the Adriatic, lifting it, swelling the cloudy
melon-green waters until they lapped at the doorsteps. In the
Piazza San Marco hundreds of people were walking about or had gathered around a
little orchestra of the kind that plays concert waltzes on the terraces of
expensive hotels. Sheltered beneath a canopy while the water rose in the
piazza, the musicians were playing as if they were the orchestra of the
Titanic. I was amazed by the river that was upwelling on the north side, with
starlight broken in reflection on its streaming wind-blown waves. I wanted
to go to an island, between ranks of abandoned cafe chairs, that it had not yet
covered, but I did not think that possible. My father asked why.
"Because of the water," I said.
"Why would that stop us."
"Our feet would get wet." Children are mystically upset by water out of place.
The island seemed ideal, and I yearned for it. God knows what I would have
given to stand on its dry surface, surrounded by the rough and rising sea. This
must have shown in my face, so, just as the orchestra had finished a song, he
picked me up and, holding me in the crook of his left arm with his right hand
pressing lightly against me to keep me in balance, he began to walk toward the
ribbon of water.
I bent my head upward, blinking in the wind. More exciting than the island
itself was the casual, unhesitating way my father walked into the water. Soon
it covered his English shoes. The pants of his pinstriped suit disappeared
almost to the knees. Although it was October and the water must have been cold,
he seemed to enjoy it. He had crossed many rivers and streams in the four years
that had just passed, in conditions that made this a blessing. He
waded through without wincing or betraying concern. He wanted to show me who he
was, and what I could be.
And by this action, he did. When he put me down on the island and I ran and
jumped about near the waves we had just crossed, I was shaken by new thoughts I
could not put into words. I did not have to, for the music began again. They
had begun to play "La Vie en Rose": a beautiful phrase, not quite translatable,
the song of the Liberation. I knew it well and was not surprised to hear it.
Perhaps because I had lived in France for almost a quarter of my
existence, in an ordinary neighborhood in Paris with people who had lived
through the occupation, even at four I was deeply moved by it. Or perhaps this
was due just to the nature of the song, which, in minors and majors, perfectly
expresses both the great joy and unspeakable sadness of having come through the
war. No song I have ever heard has its depth and complexity. No song I have
ever heard unites strength so great with beauty so shy. And this
is what I knew, when I was four, having come to Paris more than two years after
it was redeemed. By necessity my father knew much more.
***
Stepping from a C-47 into a void over Normandy, with rifle, pack, and a heavy
load of ammunition strapped to his leg, he felt the rush of breath and blood
subside as his parachute opened in magic air, as white as a cotton ball. A
major and pathfinder of the 101st, he floated down to what could very well have
been his death, and prayed as if his last, thanking God for his full life to
that moment, for the blue morning, for his near-silent flight, and
for the seconds as they passed.
He landed in a quiet and empty field, completely alone, and lived to become
part of the greatest conquering army the world has ever seen, an army that, as
it pressed toward Germany, was bent by the massive gravity of Paris, and,
contrary to plan, rushed toward this city of light. Because he was
French-speaking, he was put in the front of the Fifth Corps, and entered Paris
with the French 2nd Armored Division.
"Until that day," he told me when he was old, "I had not seen gratitude, or
joy, or grief. If God, in remembering His work, had decided to replicate the
glory of the Creation, He might have done so in the liberation of Paris. That's
what it was like. That's why I took you and your mother there. Because it was
as if the whole world was born on that day. And I thought, we can do the same."
Quite so. History had never been nor would it be so buoyant as in a single day
to rise from such darkness to such light. Many of the people who, at the end of
August, surged across the Place de l'Etoile, running to follow flags, were in
white. When seen from above, they were like the foam of a rising tide, their
mass unlike the normal mass of crowds, being as quick as driven cloud. That
they could move on that day almost as airborne as angels was
because the idea that France would be free was more beautiful even than the
idea of France itself.
Just to hear "La Vie en Rose" as we stood amid the windblown water was enough
to make my father cry. Seeing this, I embraced his leg, perhaps not so tightly
as the bag of ammunition once strapped to it, and when he picked me up I put my
arms around his neck. I did not know what he had seen or what he had come
through, but my father was moved by the resurrection of a shattered world, and
this I understood well enough.
Then came our own rush, a breathtaking run through the darkened streets of
Venice, that I will remember for the rest of my life. I don't know why he ran.
He was astonishingly strong, but he could have walked. The passages through
which we coursed at great speed were in renovation, and half the time
scaffolding blocked the sky in alternating segments. We would run through
terrific darkness, and then the boarding above us would disappear and we would
emerge again to see the stars. I cannot forget that alternation of darkness and
light, which is the way it has been ever since.
***
At the dinner party, because of my silence, they thought I was thinking about
them. And so I did begin to think about them, which broke the spell and brought
me back. Also, my wife kicked me.
I nodded, as I do when I'm brought back. I said something, I don't know what.
You see, they imagine that I have everything I want -- cars and pools and
appliances and Picassos -- only because I have what they want. But what I want
I cannot have. I cannot have so much time ahead of me that it is seemingly
without limit. I cannot any longer be quite so deeply in love with the world
now that I know that my love for it is unrequited. I cannot ride in my
father's arms. I cannot know any of the great store of his memories that he did
not tell me. And I cannot change the fact, as I am the last one who remembers
him, that all he saw, and learned, and loved, will have a second death when
they die with me.
That is why, for me, reconstruction is so urgent and its appeal so strong.
Floating down, in the last quiet seconds, it is indeed possible, with precise
and joyous recollection, to return to life the roseate glow that once it
brought to you. This I have tried to do, even at risk of smashing up a dinner
party, or two. And when we left that night, I kissed Alicia, and we embraced
for a second or two longer than anyone expected.