The presentation of the virgin by Tintoretto

Pretty awesome painting, methinks (click for larger picture):

Am I entitled to my culture?

This blogs contains a few posts that celebrate life in the mainstream. I always thought that the mainstream was suffused with beauty and love. For this reason I was loath to entirely dismiss it, and to try to reconstruct a worldview and set of practices that have no place for it. And yet, my life and my thinking have taken me so far from the French mainstream that I find myself longing for it, wasting time on forums which give me access to the normalcy of others, while I feel forever unable to relate.

So, for a while, I read the writings of all the other outsiders, Albert Camus or Simone Weil, but at other times I wish I could just unreflexively be a West European. It's a balancing game, being who you are while being who you are called to be. Can we love where we're from?

Web poetry

Alice blogs from a place in France where my grandparents used to live. This post of hers is so poetic that I can't help but want to "save" it in my little corner of the web:

Pourtant elles étaient là ces secondes de vie
la dernière fois que j'ai porté mon enfant sur la hanche
la dernière fois que sa main s'est glissée dans la mienne
ces instants où je m'asseyais à la table avec confiance
alors que j'étais pour toujours ton enfant
le temps de ta joue encore douce
avant le temps des larmes et du bord de la tombe
je les cherche et crois les saisir mais elles me glissent des mains
petits poissons d'argent le long d'un fil qui me brûle les doigts