LANDSCAPES

Hi again,

Tomorrow was…… 5 days later.
Feeling commited to landscapes. Geographical landscapes can fit into our own mental landscapes, collapse with them or just get passed by. But it does matter for me. One of my favourites landscapes is seen from the coupole of the Panthéon in Paris. Possibility to turn 360° around and around and get the city of Paris under a different angle every time. Kind of original landscape compaired to those from Notre-Dame or the Eiffel Tower, or even the Arch of Triumph. The worst landscape I know is also from Paris, when one stares at the terr……rrrible Montparnasse Tower: crappy building. What a shame!

Back to "normal landscapes", out of "cityscapes" I will recall:
- A narrow and windy road in Burgundy, alongside "l'Armançon", a river, between Montbard and Tonnerre. Early morning, sunrays between the two lines of trees, one for each bank of the water. I was a kid in our family car. A view and an atmosphere which sends me to a rêverie…
- Those sequences of islands and lakes by road 62, from Mikkeli to Puumala, but especially after Puumala… At twilights in summertime: gives me the feel I've been here before, few thousand years ago. One of my favourite Finnish landscapes with Koli, and in and around Jyväskylä… Reposaari too… for another reason: land swallowed into the sea.
- Incredible hiking track East of Meyrueis in the French Cévennes. The path to Cabrillac. Valleys on both sides.
- River Thames in Henley: such a green haze, greens melting in the meadows, around the willows, linked by the same colours displayed by the Thames…
- Dawn in Montsegur Castle, seen from the high walls.  4 am in July, looking North: a magic embrace over those lowerlands and plains of Midi. Thinking - never forgetting - of the people who resisted there in 1243-1244. Flash back of imagination.
- Arrival to the Atlantic Ocean in La Joselière, Vendée. In 1962, when we were 11 and 9 with my brother Daniel. Hearts pounding while the car was driving up the coastline just before the wide seascape "exploding" in total view. Our extatic faces hit by blows of light, chilly wind and the thickest air.
- Those heights overlooking Monthermé in the French Ardennes. A place called "Les Hauts Buttés" I used to link to Julien Gracq's book, "Un balcon en forêt'. Back to the primitive forest and to beautiful loneliness among my tree friends. From there, worth to walk East, across the woods, towards the Belgian border. Something to experiment for a European soul!
- "My" straight roads in the far outskirts of Paris, South and South-East of the French capital, across the Brie and Eastern Beauce. Roads bordered with poplars, open fields everywhere, roads like veins, soil like skin.
- Wineyards in Elsass, at the hills overlooking Andlau, a village South of Barr. Geometrical designs below the woods, round and circular village underneath its wineyards. Close to paradise… When mankind seems perfectly in tune with nature.

Soon, musics, only musics… Next week but not tomorrow. No.

JPF