On England

Months later, the things I remember the best from the short trip my brother and I made to England over the Christmas holidays are home cooked meals and English tea, the warmth of strangers' hearths and the chaos of the organ and the bells. The next thing that comes to mind is the phrase, “we have walked and tubed the shit out of London today.”

Boarding the small airplane that would take us from Rennes to Southampton, we took to the air like privileged time travelers, climbing up a small flight of stairs directly off the runway. Time travelers, because having left Rennes at 16h20 we would arrive in the land of tea and crumpets, dry humor and wet fog, at the very same time; and privileged, because we felt privileged to be traveling to a land where the people speak English!

After our arrival in England and reunion with my friend Cheryl, our generous, intelligent, beautiful and masterchef host for the holidays, the short drive from Southampton to Salisbury was spent catching up on the last couple months of our respective lives since one sad Sunday morning in September when Cheryl naively offered up, “Hey, you’re going to be in France all year, right? You can spend Christmas in England with me and my family!” On the part of my brother and I, this short trip was also spent cringing at the surely impending death of every left turn.

. . .

Midnight Christmas Eve mass at Salisbury Cathedral ended with an explosive and drawn-out organ solo that seemed to shake apart the quiet solace that had reigned over the entire ceremony. Rather than a frightening or unholy outburst after a pleasantly well-executed ritual, the organ’s chest-vibrating, dissonant blossoming was, for me, an exuberant and mercurial celebration of the comedy of life. A few days later, London’s Westminster Abbey would ring out in a similarly absurd Dionysian burst of laughter, filling tourists’ diaphragms and the early evening air with an overlapping and revelrous symphony of bells that would reign over the Thames for no less than eleven minutes. In the same way, two months later, the uncontrollable laughter of a mother and her son would fill an entire metro car with the stifled sounds of attempted discretion at the simple uttering of the name, Harriet.
(EDIT: "I realized that if my body broke, I would break into blossom")

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« Où se trouve la beauté ? Dans les grandes choses qui, comme les autres, sont condamnées à mourir, ou bien dans les petites qui, sans prétendre à rien, savent incruster dans l’instant une gemme d’infini ? » // "Where is beauty found? In the big things which, like all others, are condemned to die, or rather in the little things which, without pretending a thing, can embed in one moment the gem of the infinite?"