I’m convinced I can sometimes smell the surpassing attitude Les Pierres takes toward my preferred way of evaluating life’s offerings, roughly summarized by the best being a foreclosed enemy of the good, its overexposed colorized skies regularly falling on top of us, its enlargements or reductions of details and the casually sliding scales in between, acting like breathing creatures in dormancy who slowly alter their appearance to move along with time, barely noticeable but definitely causing that keen and vivid whiff I sense early morning when opening the front door, like unasked for white on Christmas Day.
Mon Mec agrees this is all too much, he clearly abhors the cold his first snow brings along, forcing a U-turn inside but nature’s wealth inevitably draws us both out for a rerun shortly after, when our initial shudder is met with compassion and most is already melted, rearranged into a more subtile indication of the season we’re in.
It’s like a trap I set up for ourselves, a self-fulfilling prophecy of expecting beauty unremittingly because that’s my thing to strive for, to always pay the closest of attention to and to fully and wholeheartedly embrace and thurify, but to be so excessively affirmed therein that it starts to feel unreal and undue, or in need of appropriate compensation by articulating all that went wrong at the same time, like the mess inside for not having done yesterdays dishes and the disastrous delay in preparing for our Christmas dinner after spending so much time fixing the drains, as if those aggravations were to be true deal breakers for happiness.
The playwright I still pretend to be will muse on Thornton Wilder’s play ‘The Woman of Andros’, wherein the story of the Hero and the King of the Dead is told: “Suddenly the hero saw that the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure; for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment.”
It’s a bit early for new years resolutions, yet I instruct myself hereby to put even more effort into consolidating and appreciating the luck of our draw. Les Pierres might not be all paradise, it’s pretty damn close.
