Beaux Arts

The weather here, though gloriously cool, has been on the gloomy side . . . yesterday and today especially were, so I thought they would be good museum days. Upon my encountering the line to get in to the Musée d'Orsay, I decided to buy a  2-day museum pass, a handy ticket that allowed me to skip the lines and have unlimited access to most of the major museums and monuments in Paris . . . for two days. I calculated that if I went to at least four museums in those two days, the price would even out, and I would still get to skip the lines. So yesterday I went to the Orsay and the archeological crypt of Notre Dame, and today I went to the Orangerie and the Louvre. Folks, I have crammed in more famous art than you can imagine. I realize that I'm here for an extended stay and could have tackled these at a leisurely pace, yet there is SO much to do, and though I do like art and museums, I would much rather wander a Paris street than a Paris museum. Nonetheless, one cannot come to Paris without seeing the masters and their masterpieces, no? It has been wonderful, but it also feels like I've eaten just a bit too much of something very rich and, as a result, lost the savory quality of the experience towards the end. Over the past few days I've sampled Monet, Manet, Renoir, Cézanne, Soutine, Picasso, Gauguin, Matisse, Rodin, Van Gogh, Modigliani, Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Botticelli, Lippi, Vermeer, Delacroix, Van Eyck and many more whose names I cannot recall at the moment. I'm stuffed. The beauty is, if I want to go back and taste something again before I leave, I can. I just have to wait in line and pay the entrance fee . . .

L'Orangerie was my favorite . . . small and on the edge of the Tuileries, it features a fabulous collection of Modern artists and Monet's vast Water Lily panels in rooms he designed just for those paintings.

On another note, I solidly decided just this morning,  to add on to the poems set in Ghana that I've already written, and compile a collection entitled (this is a working title, ya'll, so have mercy) Gossamer and Ghanaian Fruit: A Collection of Poems. I don't think I'll post many of my poems up for a bit, but in the interest of the theme of this blog and in honor of my past two days, below is a poem by W.H. Auden.

Musée des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.