Yes, yes, no blog in more than a week, but here we are, back in Texas, reflecting. Much doing of the writing sort has happened in the past week, siphoning off blog juices I suppose, and much of just living, which takes up time and thought. Also, one was in Cambridge for a couple of days, without computer access. But here in the Wood Between the Worlds, there is time to reflect on all that.
You are all familiar with The Magician’s Nephew, are you not – the Narnia book I like to read to students first, before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? And with the place neither here nor there, the place rich with possibility and change, but changeless itself, full of portals to other worlds: the Wood Between the Worlds? We are now home, in the Wood, for a full month before putting on our “away” rings again, and stepping into a different pond from last time, the pond that will take us to Japan. There is plenty of time to wander about the Wood in a dreamy sort of way, and try to understand where we’ve been.
Our first night back in Texas, I woke up to the scent of old wood. Our whole house is made of wood, of course, and it was built in 1940, so it is I suppose old. Houses in Paris, as in Rome and most other places with more stone than standing lumber, are made of stone, brick, plaster and concrete, not wood, so home always smells woody, by comparison. Like C.S. Lewis’ Wood, it is a bit of an in-between place, College Station, as the name implies: a train station between Hither and Yon, a place on Highway Six, which, as one is frequently reminded “runs both ways” (in other words: you came here by it, and by golly, you can leave by it again too, if you don't like it here!). It is a place full of potential, a gateway to other places, but not much of a place in itself. Young faculty come here, raise their small children, make their mark, and move on to more famous pastures: it is a seedbed, if you like, full of rich promise, but never seeing it come to full flower. Things grown here are generally transplanted to deeper soil. We’re still here, of course, so we much go out to see grown-up things, elsewhere.
There is a ring of graceful little oaks, around the park across the street, but the soil here is not very good for tall trees: before it had houses put on it, this was Prairie, with a bit of Post Oak Savannah, thrown in: clay soil, heavy and dense. Around here, the tall trees only thrive in the river-bottoms; I long to live in a river-bottom like that, and have tall trees arching high overhead but river-bottoms are always flooding, hereabouts. Dangerous.
Perhaps that is what makes places like France so exciting: they are all one big floodplain, full of tall trees, very dangerous, very exciting: things really happen, there. Oh, yes, they certainly do happen: the last survivors of the 1871 Paris Commune are put up against a cemetery wall (having already shot their own hostages and having spent the night in a shootout among the graves of Pere Lachaise Cemetery), all 150-ish of them, shot, and buried where they fall. Convenient, having a shootout in a cemetery! And so the story goes, all over Paris: what a blood-spattered city! 2000 guillotined in the Place di la Concorde, alone! Yessir, things really happen, in France. No wonder the cathedrals there are as tall as a grove of sequoias!
Speaking of floodplains, I have to report officially that France’s countryside is more beautiful than England’s: I have seen them side by side in one day and can certify it as a fact. On the train from Cambridge to London, and London to Dover-ish (wherever it is that the Chunnel goes under) – admittedly not the best landscape the UK has to offer – we see similar plains and low hills, similar lines of bare trees punctuated by small hamlets, but the hamlets of that part of England are entirely Semi-Detatched Villas of extreme mundanitude… whereas, after your 20 minutes under the English Channel (or La Manche, as they call it in France, “the Sleeve,” as they are loath to let the English have it) – twenty minutes!!! do you have any idea how long it takes by ferry, and how much more seasickness is involved?? – you are among the equally hilly areas alternating with equally flat landscapes, but the French villages cluster like – oh, dear, I’ve been in France too long, I was going to say like aureoles around a nipple, but with the little, single, squat-towered churches and the beauty of them and all, standing among the swelling fields, it’s an embarrassingly apt comparison – and then, the alleés of typical Lombardy poplars or plane-trees, along the roads, man-made though they are, add an irresistable touch of grace, wherever they’re put, like downbeats in a dance. The houses of the villages stand “detatched” and homey-looking, each with its shutters and its yard and its tree. And the persistent overcast of England has risen and is blowing away: real, fleecy high clouds appear, and there is a glimpse of blue lit by sunset. France is beautiful: she is la belle France. Bloody, but beautiful; like civilization itself, I suppose.
Here, we live in a dream of that sort of beauty, and of that sort of danger, of a place where Catholics can rise up and kill 3000 Protestants in a day, where even the smallest town in southern France can even today have its government taken over by a coup d’ètat. But also a place where one of the stations available on cable is the Couture channel, with models marching down runways every day, where couples kiss as they part to take different subway lines, where accordionists make a good living busking on the subway trains themselves, and where small, unescorted dogs sit politely in the doorway of the charcuterie, hoping for mercy.
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