Once upon a time we weren't buried in brands, enticed to 'like' chic luggage and major airlines on FB, as if suddenly glamorous by association. Travel is anything but attractive...
Mio marito recently skidded in from Eurasia, he'll travel to another 5 countries in the next 10 days. I project nothing but stress, what with sim chips, plugs, phones, currencies, passports let alone packing for multiple places and meetings. Interesting, perhaps. Stressful, very.
I suppose the change of scenery could provide enough sensory overload to override the reality. But travel can be rough.
Ironically enough traveling to Paris is far more glamorous than living and banking in la lumiere. Arguing in another language with inebriated neighbors once famous for soft porn movies like Emmanuel was less than, but yes, traveling by train to Paris is glamorous, d'accord.
Alors, plane travel, not so much. No matter which class, hassle will arrive in the form of best friend or close acquaintance.
Worse yet, unimaginable even, to think a female might pay several hundred dollars to travel to New York or San Francisco, perhaps to attend her best friends wedding, only to be turned away because another female can't feel her up because the TSA doesn't have a woman reporting to duty that day. It. Boggles. My. Mind.
So rather than bitch about it and because I practice what I preach I won't escape to the mountains and write poetry. Instead, I'll replace modernity with the past, I'll leave mac lap tops and computers on 'sleep' mode and iphones safely hidden in the kitchen behind the doggie snack canister and focus on reading.
Yes, enough of slick brands, time to slip into the distant past and re-visit when eccentrics like Lord Berners met the father of modern art, the maestro to end all, the renowned impresario Serge Pavlovich Diaghilev.
The biography by Mark Amory is worthy of your time if only to read his epitaph; Here lies Lord Berners/One of life's learners, Thanks be to the Lord/He was never bored.
Anything but facile, Lord Berners was detail oriented to the nth degree. Lord Berners; a man with pigeons died all the colors of the rainbow, his horse came to luncheon daily. A composer and writer, eccentric and enigmatic; alternatively silly, sparkling and touching. The Sitwells and Mitfords, Stravinsky and Gertrude Stein all came to stay and see the pigeons until the 'happening'.
Until he met Diaghilev. Our Father of Modern Art, I could post blessay after blessay about Sergei and have, if only to vicariously live through the man that everyone came to meet, to perform with and for, the spirit that danced at the centre of any group he joined. Diaghilev dominated and drew Balanchine, Massine, Karsaniva, Nijinsky and Stravinsky, Picasso, Coco Chanel, Cocteau and Brecht, Rubenstein and all the rest.
He visited and enjoyed a brief correspondence with Tolstoy. He grew up in Perm, his childhood home once described as the Athens of Perm.
Marcel Proust attended two of Diaghilev's early performances, comparing the excitement surrounding Sergei and his group with the brouhaha sparked by a contemporary cause celebre, 'describing the season as a charming occasion, against whole seductions only the critics who were devoid of taste protested [and which] aroused Paris...with a fever of curiosity that was less bitter, more purely aesthetic, but perhaps quite as intense as the Dreyfus Affair.'
When Pierre Bonnard, one of France's most prominent painters was asked whether the Russians influenced his work, he answered, "But they influence everyone."
Well, if the Russians get their act together regarding their internal resources, watch out world because they're smart and certainly tougher than others. More artistic than most and yet what I find most interesting about them is their canny sense of time. So contrary to my American need for instant gratification which seems to wane, as does my desire to acquire.
Through osmosis we may learn and let lovely art inspire us, encourage a read every now and then. A lovely exercise to put aside the present and dwell on the reference points that made our past so novel, so curious, not unlike escaping to the mountains and writing poetry.
But without the hassle of travel.
