[Click the portraits to display the letter]
An English translation of Lévy's initial reaction to the Polanski case was published on 27 October 2009 in the US liberal news website co-founded by the Greek-American author and syndicated columnist Arianna Huffington. [Click the banner to read this article]
However, I'm thinking of using Twitter systematically to announce new blog posts. For the moment, I haven't made up my mind whether to make such announcements in English, in French or in both languages.
First, of course, this erudite Oxford professor has a profound mastery, not only of zoology (his basic field), but of neighboring sciences such as biology and paleontology. Besides, Dawkins is quite at ease in fields such as games theory and statistics, and he's even a competent computer programmer. The second obvious ingredient of Dawkins' success as a writer is his virtuosity in the domain of the English language, which he handles constantly with the sensitivity of a poet. His scientific and literary achievements are reflected in the fact that Dawkins, in Britain, is both a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. When appropriate, he can fall deliberately into the casual vernacular of a journalist writing in a popular magazine, just as he can switch on instantly, if need be, the didactic language of a schoolmaster. He can throw a tender personal anecdote into the middle of pages of scientific explanations:
The first Dawkins book I read was The Blind Watchmaker, which stunned me instantly. That was the first time I had ever heard of the possibility (today, I would say the certainty) that, on the early inanimate planet Earth, a crude mineral self-copying entity composed solely of clay or crystal had evolved into the fabulous DNA replicator that has since become the unique basis of all life on the planet.
Several of these delightful creatures are lodged here at Gamone, where they offer me aeronautical shows in the twilight on late summer afternoons... like the fruit bats in my native Grafton.
In Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins expresses his utter amazement concerning another creature of which there are ample specimens here at Gamone: the spider. Their web-building operations, as explained by Dawkins, are fantastic.
Now, insofar as I'm particularly fond of figs (receiving fruit from Madeleine and Dédé, as well as from Bob's tree... while waiting for my own—given to me by Natacha and Alain—to become productive), I had imagined that I probably knew at least a thing or two about this fruit. Well, it turns out that, before reading Dawkins, I was totally and dismally ignorant on the subject of figs. First, what we imagine as the so-called "fruit" is not at all a true fruit. It's rather a strange garden of countless delicate fig flowers. What we see as the fig's skin might be thought of as the "earth" in which these flowers are growing. And the garden has curved, over evolutionary time, into a concave bulb that hides the flowers. Furthermore, inside this closed garden, the fig flowers live and procreate thanks to the complex services rendered by a community of devoted little male and female wasps, whose entire existence and survival are inextricably linked to the fig tree in question. In order to understand what happens in this mysterious garden, I started to draw a few diagrams like this one, which indicates the four principal actors: male and female fig flowers, female wasps and wingless male wasps.
The female wasps (made pregnant prior to their actual birth) stuff pollen from male flowers into their breasts and escape from the fig garden through holes in the "earth" burrowed by males. As soon as a female wasp locates another "garden" with female flowers waiting to be pollinated, she crawls in through the tiny hole at the extremity of the fig, maybe tearing off her wings in the process. Apparently we crunch such microscopic Agaondae wasps every time we bite into a fig, but they can do us no harm. Within the confines of this blog, I certainly don't intend to try to delve more deeply into the fabulous fig story. In any case, Dawkins has already told this story fully and splendidly. I recommend his book to everybody who's sensitive to all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.
[Click the photo to visit their website.]
When you slit open the cellophane, the contents emit a wonderful aroma of damp moss and wood.
Once the moss is shaken off, the moist bare peoney roots have such a delightful wine-hued aspect and vegetal aroma that you might feel like eating them. (Well, that's what I felt.)
I'll wait until spring before describing exactly what I've now planted at Gamone in the way of roses and peonies.
The employee told me that several rocks had fallen, reaching the roadway at distinct spots over a distance of fifty meters. There seemed to be four separate rocks.
The "footprints" of rock #1, before it terminated its itinerary in the middle of the road, can be seen in the macadam. Rock #2 must have bounced off the slopes at a certain height and landed directly like a bomb on the edge of the roadway, where the violence of the impact shattered it into fragments of creamy limestone.
Rock #3 was halted by the protective net, whereas rock #4 smashed a wooden post, broke through the netting and left a telltale hole in the roadside earth where it bounced before ending its trajectory down on the edge of the Bourne.
An hour later, a civil-security helicopter was flying over the scene, taking a close look at the spot on the top of the mountain where the rocks had been dislodged. Their verdict: Bigger rocks were poised, ready to roll down the slopes. So, the road was immediately closed... probably for several weeks. To escape from Gamone without going through Pont-en-Royans, there are several solutions, all of which involve roundabout routes up over the surrounding mountains. You might say that this is the price I pay for living in such an exotic setting as Choranche.
Not surprisingly, Sophia saw this as wasteful behavior, which she's not prepared to tolerate. So, on wintry afternoons, whenever Sophia feels that she hasn't consumed a sufficient quantity of calories to keep out the cold, she'll have a handy larder.
Normally, this kind of stuff shouldn't be lying on my kitchen floor. I had taken this wad out of the attic with the intention of stuffing a few strands into a crack on top of an outside door frame. Then, when the tempest started to blow up yesterday, I rapidly collected everything that was scattered around outside. So, overnight, the wad remained on my kitchen floor. This morning, returning from a trip into the village, I found my Sophia stretched out comfortably on top of it. I believe that both cats and dogs have a remarkable intuition for detecting cozy places to lie down. They're surely equipped, in their chromosomes, with some kind of a soft-mattress-detector gene.
France's celebrated actor Gérard Depardieu is suspected (but not yet formally accused) of having attacked an innocent automobile parked in a Paris street in the vicinity of Gérard's apartment. He operated almost barehanded, so it appears. The damages are brutal: a broken windshield and doors kicked in.
If indeed this hypothesis of an aversion to automobiles turned out to be correct, then it would be nice if Gérard were to go along to the police station, when he is summoned, on horseback, like Don Quixote. This would make a huge positive impact upon global-warming protagonists throughout the world... and might even persuade the municipal authorities in Paris—who have already reintroduced bicycles with much success—to examine the possibility of reverting massively to horses for transport inside the City of Light.
This automobile—the Gégémobile—could rapidly become a unique and highly-priced collector's item.
Then it spends the day moving towards Pont-en-Royans (as it were, to the right of the photo), and finally disappears below the crest of the Baret (seen, in the following photo, from my bedroom window).
Soon, the Sun will be appearing, not to the right of the Cournouze, but further to the left, above the mountain. And, since it needs extra time to "climb" to the top of the mountain, this means that, for me, the Sun will in fact appear in the sky of Châtelus later than at present. But, as of today, the days will, of course, be growing longer. As you can see, understanding what's happening in the heavens is complicated when you live in a place such as Gamone, surrounded by mountains. But I've grown accustomed to this environment, and I would surely be unhappy if I had to wake up every morning in the middle of a plain.
Instead of going down in History because of his "Eppur si muove", he would be remembered through a prosaic mea culpa: "My thinking was screwed up by the haze above the Cournouze."
In any case, I'm unanimous in considering that it's outrageous to use the United Nations approach, based upon unanimous decisions, when it comes to making plans to save the planet Earth. Something will have to change fundamentally in the decision-making process to avoid the risk, in the future, of wasting the time and energy of heads of state and environmental experts from all the nations of the globe. While they're at it, maybe it would be a good idea to take a close look at the logic (or lack of logic) that enables a tiny country such as Tuvalu, say, to speak with the same weight as a great nation. You will have guessed that I've never been wildly enthusiastic about the concept of democracy... although it's difficult to imagine a sound system to replace it.
In my article of 3 September 2009 entitled Genealogical breakthrough [display], I indicated that this monarch was one of my countless great(x22)-grandfathers. As every English-speaking schoolchild knows, one of the only positive acts of this appalling king consisted of his being forced to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. If you read his biography, you'll see that John married twice, to two women named Isabelle, the second of whom was the French matriarch of the Plantagenêt dynasty of English kings. But who was this alleged offspring of John named Richard FitzRoy, born in 1187, who was an ancestor of mine? Well, he was an illegitimate son of the 20-year-old future king and his cousin Suzanne de Warenne.
The former verandahs of the original building have been closed by insipid weatherboard walls with modern windows, and the base of the façades has been bricked in, producing the global effect of a dull cube. All the old-world architectural charm of the original edifice—which used to be of a greenish-gray color—has disappeared.
Having learned a few months ago that I descend from a royal bastard named Fitzroy—son of the future monarch who would sign reluctantly the Great Charter of Freedoms at Runnymede on 16 June 1215, laying the foundations of constitutional law as it still exists today—I'm amused to discover allusions to these events (of a strictly fortuitous and superficial nature) at the spot in the Antipodes where my peephole opened on 24 September 1940.
This means that she has snow in her genes. For Sophia, whenever Gamone is all white, she considers that the weather has returned to its normal state, as it should be all year round.
She rolls in the snow with bliss, as if she were floating in a bath. Motionless, with closed eyes, soaking in the "warmth" of the snow, she looks like a frozen Arctic beast dug up out of the ice.
Then she jumps up and slides down the slopes as if she were skiing.
Meanwhile, Moshé looks down at us with a puzzled expression, as if to ask: "Where has all the green grass gone?"
As for me, I'm wondering whether friends might happen to drop in unexpectedly for tea and biscuits out on the lawn. Funnily, the outside temperature is quite mild, and there's not even the slightest cool breeze.
It's unlikely, because no ordinary vehicle could ever drive up here today. [BREAKING NEWS: At the moment I was writing that last sentence, the village snow plow went by, and Gamone is now perfectly accessible.] Inside the house, of course, a fire is burning non-stop in the living room.
Along with the all-embracing whiteness, the most magical aspects of a Gamone snow scene are the luminosity and the silence.
Well, at the end of a September evening of copious drinking and smoking, our hero wandered off on foot, in a dazed state, into the misty Breton countryside. Feeling a little drowsy, he decided to bed down for the night between the rails of the TGV line between Paris and Quimper. Not unexpectedly, a few hours later on, a TGV happened to pass by, at a speed of a few hundred kilometers an hour. The train driver had the visual impression that he had run over a human being. He promptly stopped his train, 800 meters further down the track, and walked back to inspect the situation. He came upon our hero, apparently unharmed, and fast asleep. Finding it impossible to wake him, the train-driver phoned the local gendarmes, who soon arrived on the scene. With all these intruders gazing down on him, and trying to shake him out of his deep slumber, our hero was disturbed, indeed rightly annoyed. He sat up, yawned, half-opened his eyes, discovered the gendarmes, and promptly made a meaningful greeting sign with his extended middle finger, of the following kind:
He would have liked to get back to sleep, but the gendarmes insisted upon taking him to a cozy spot down at their barracks. Yesterday, a judge ordered him to pay 3,000 euros to the French railway authorities, to cover the expenses incurred by stopping the TGV and arriving late in Quimper. The wise judge said: "It's rare for a judge to tell an offender that he's lucky to be brought to trial. But you're a miracle case." Hearing this boring admonition from a wide-awake judge, our hero no doubt yawned and resisted with difficulty the desire to fall asleep.
Wow, what a drive he must have! A hole-in-one every day he hits off. Surely a great mattress-putter, too. In any case, a splendid role model for horny youths who yearn to become top players, indeed champions.
And here's a terribly cute video presentation of Mormonism that I found on the web:
If ever a miracle were to occur and the voice of God were to boom out from the heavens above Gamone, informing me that it was time for me to choose a religion and pay up my church membership fees, I think I would become a Mormon. To borrow the language of Some Grey Bloke in my earlier article entitled Nasty stuff, should be censured [display], I like their options. I mean, those laid-back Utah spirit-chicks in Jerusalem were really angelic, in a cute way. Besides, at a deeper spiritual level, if you were to ask me to sum up my impressions of the fabulous theology of Mormonism in a single word, I would not hesitate in saying that it's truly... cute.
[Click on the image to display a larger version.]
Click the picture to visit his website, where you can appreciate his broad and profound wisdom on many subjects. If you happen to be Australian, you should hurry. One never knows. Progress is such that you might not be allowed to watch this fellow in the near future.
