Walking and birdwatching on the Camargue, near Saintes Marie
I have just finished reading Frederic Mistral‘s Mirèio in English through a florrid but free translation hosted at Project Gutenberg. I was slowly reading it during the two weeks we spent in Provence on this trip to the south of France. It’s amazing.
It is an epic poem, about the silk maker Mirèio who comes from a a family that owns land and livestock, and who falls involve with an itinerant basket weaver called Vincen. It’s a classic Romeo and Juliet story, of star crossed lovers. The plot is simple enough: boy and girl fall in love but their class differences make marriage impossible. The girl repels all suitors, and her parents angrily forbid her from ever seeing her true love. She runs away across the bleak plains and salt marshes of The Crau and the Camargue until she takes sanctuary in the chapel of the Saintes Maries. She is pursued by her father’s harvestmen and by Vincen but by the time everyone catches up with her, she has succumbed to heat stroke and dies in the arms of her true love.
The poem is structured across 12 cantos. The extended form allows Mistral to slowly move the action across the various regions of his beloved homeland in Provence. The poem is a love letter to the land and is written in Provençal, as an artistic expression of his cultural work, to revitalize the language and tell the stories of the land and the people in their own tongue. It was largely on the basis of this work that Mistral received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904. The poem is a love story, a geographic meditation, a travelogue, a history and a collection of myths and magical experiences.
Mistral’s very name is soaked in Provencal lore. The mistral wind is the strong cold northwesterly that blows down the Rhone and clears everything away, especially in the winter months. It is the predominant atmospheric feature of the region and even in mid May, as we were walking between hill towns, it blew relentlessly for several days, a few hours at a time, but with a force and character that was unmistakable.
We weren’t walking through the region that Mistral describes in Mirèio; we were walking further north in the Luberon and Vaucluse, but we did visit the Camargue and stayed a night in Saintes Maries de la Mer, the town in which Mary Magdalene and her entourage were said to have been blown to in a storm as they escaped the Holy Land after Jesus’ crucifixion.
Nevertheless, the landscape, the architecture, and the way of life that Mistral describes in Mirèio are all present to this day in some ways in this part of the world. Having his words and impressions, lovingly committed to the page with dedication to his people, history and culture that is unparalleled. It was a beautiful gift to walk with.
I have been paying close attention to my sleep patterns, aided by my Apple Watch and a new CPAP machine which is helping sleep more deeply. As a result I am becoming increasingly familiar with how sleep works, from the phases of REM, to the waves of light and deep sleep I go through. I've been surprised to learn that waking up is a normal and healthy part of sleep (although waking up because you can't breathe is not, hence the sleep therapy).
So things catch my eye, and today's rabbit hole is aided by this article which describes more ancient and natural human sleep patterns during which a period of wakefulness is common and expected.
For most of human history, a continuous eight-hour snooze was not the norm. Instead, people commonly slept in two shifts each night, often called a “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Each of these sleeps lasted several hours, separated by a gap of wakefulness for an hour or more in the middle of the night. Historical records from Europe, Africa, Asia and beyond describe how, after nightfall, families would go to bed early, then wake around midnight for a while before returning to sleep until dawn.
Sleep patterns and managing the kind of light I am exposed to before bed and in the morning is radically changing how I feel during the day in the first couple of weeks of this new regime. Combined with the therapy, I am much better rested, even with less than 8 hours in bed. No midday sleepiness, less grogginess in the morning. On this trip I have handled jet lag better and recovery from a cross-country redeye has been easier on my system than usual.
Ann Linnea goes for a walk in the woods on her island home in the Salish Sea, 160km to the south of me. She loves spring, as do I. The sea lions have started to leave here and there are only a few left meaning that, for the first time since November, there is actually silence at night. And like Ann also observes, our two most common early warblers are back, the yellow-rumped and the orange-crowned. On top of that the dominant sparrow call is now the white crowned. Over the past week they have been appearing and singing more and more.
Meanwhile, over on the other side of their breakfast table, Ann’s beloved partner and one of my mentors Christina Baldwin turns 80. Happy birthday dear one!
“Thunderous and well rehearsed improvisations,” relates Edward R. Murrow when telling an anecdote about how an acquaintance described a lunch meeting with Churchill. But watch until the end, when Murrow shares his opinion on human rights and the obligations of the powers that command world-ending violence.
On a related note, Peter Levine makes the case that not only has a war crime been committed with the President’s foul utterances on Monday, but there is a collective and moral guilt that flows from that. This guilt dogs generations, and extends beyond borders. His reflections on Jaspers’ types of collective and personal guilt are a good roadmap for reconciliation and repair.
On the eve of a tyrant threatening to totally eliminate one of our planet’s civilizations, the astronauts returning home from the far side of the moon shared this photo of an earthset.
These two events offer us a choice.
I’m giving Current a spin. It is an RSS feed reader that is built differently. It treats RSS feeds as readable treats rather than emails to be answered and processed. It deliberately seeks to remove the stressful and addictive interfaces that drive social media and productivity software, and it offers a clean interface for the words written by my friends and those I admire and follow. This might be the best way to get into reading blogs again for those of you that don’t do it yet.
Small town libraries save the world. I live in a small town. I spend more time at the library than perhaps any other single place in this town. I use it as an office, a place to rest, a place to meet people, to learn about things, to learn how to swing dance or listen to my friends and neighbours sharing stories. So enjoy Nick Fuller Googins’ essay on small town libraries:
Another library book introduced me to Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, a maverick scientist-artist who travels the world, collects mutated insects downwind of nuclear reactors, then documents the deformities by painting slides. How fascinating! How bizarre! What could be the subject of a book itself ended up as a side-plot in my novel, set in San Luis Obispo (downwind of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant), and ready to derail Josie’s ant dissertation and academic career.
Would I have stumbled across these odd tidbits online, or through AI prompts? Possibly. Doing generative research online, however, is like dipping a glass into the Pacific in hopes of finding an “interesting” cup of water. How do you know when you have one? How does Google or Grok sift and deliver results, compared with a living, breathing human at Belfast’s Public Library? They can’t.
One reason that small-town library research works so well is because of its natural parameters. Rather than an ocean of information to click through, you get a small stack of books. A small stack of books is manageable. It’s focusing. In our era of seemingly limitless data, I for one thrive on these boundaries. By constraining my initial research like this, oddly enough, I was expanding my results.
Just today I stopped into my own small town library to set up a meeting with one of the staff members and another friend, and I walked out of there with “A Psalm for The Wild Built” which my friend Marysia described as “HopePunk” (a genre I was thrilled to know existed!) and I was sold, especially after three of the staff there recommended it and Becky Chambers’ work in general. This author is new to me, but a sweet novel under 200 pages recommended by great people ticks all the boxes for me.