sorry, i can't come to the phone right now
it's not you, it's me.
This past week, I spent five days in France, drinking Aperol spritzes and eating a lot of bread (as I like to do), and today I realized something: I don’t feel like talking right now.
The thing about me being in France is that I don’t really speak French. I can say the important things - hello, thank you, I’m sorry, two small beers, please - but other than that I don’t know the language at all. This makes me an enormous burden on my husband, who has to do all the communicating (he speaks quite good French!), but over time I’ve come to appreciate that I really, really, really like being somewhere that I literally can’t talk to people. It is so relaxing, but more than that, it feels very freeing. It’s a bit like being a ghost, I imagine: you can look and see and hear, but you don’t quite understand anyone and you can’t get through to them. There is a kind of absence of responsibility in this state that feels unusual, almost childlike, even.
For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to write a newsletter about Berthe Morisot - researching, jotting down notes, saving images of paintings - and just failing to put anything good together. And today I thought, why am I pushing this? Why try so hard to write when I don’t really have anything to say?
In my real (non-Internet) life, I’ve been feeling a similar urge to remain silent. I just don’t feel that I have anything I really want to speak out loud. It feels better to think, and feel, and absorb life around me right now. Cups of tea, sewing projects, classic novels - I simply want to do and consume and study at the moment. I want to look, I want to see.
So here are a few photos from my trip, and a Mary Oliver poem that has been resonating with me recently.
best,
Just enjoy yourself. It's so great that you are able to relax and not feel you have to do something you don't feel like doing. All best to you.
I too love being in the middle of people that I can't understand. There is truly something liberating about it. The feeling of being totally anonymous, I find intoxicating. And then when I am back where I can understand everything that is said anywhere near where I am; on a train, in a restaurant, standing on the street, I am brought back to reality with a jolt.