The French burg that I know best, after Paris, is Montpellier. Just as General Douglas McCarthur landed at Inchon on his way up the Korean peninsula…. Hmm, scratch that. Just as many another overseas for a year student ended up at Paul Valery university for the year in France, so did I. That was a crucial year for me, a defining year. Montpellier, at that time, was still the crossroads of the last hippy contingent, for one thing. In Agnes Varda’s Sans Toit ni Loi , from 1985, the Sandrine Bonnaire character wanders in the Languedoc region – which was a shrewd hit. No novel conveys that late walkabout period like The Savage Detectives. The decision-driftmaking is perfectly conveyed in part of that novel. The zeitgeist went like this: “Our money ran out in Paris, but we weren’t ready to go home, so we made our way out of the city somehow and hitched south. Near Orléans we were picked up by a camper van. The driver was German and his name was Hans. He was heading south too, with his w
“But the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends us, but also by her influence on the earth. No thinker can afford to overlook the influence of the moon any more than the astronomer can. " The moon gravitates towards the earth, and the earth reciprocally towards the moon." This statement of the astronomer would be bald and meaningless, if it were not in fact a symbolical expression of the value of all lunar influence on man. Even the astronomer admits that " the notion of the moon's influence on ter restrial things was confirmed by her manifest effect upon the ocean," but is not the poet who walks by night conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be referred to lunar influence, in which the ocean within him over flows its shores and bathes the dry land ? Has he not his spring-tides and his neap-tides, the former sometimes combining with the winds of heaven to produce those memorable high tides of the calendar which leave thei