OFTEN in the sketch for a portrait, the invisible lines that bridge one stroke of the pencil or brush to another are what really make it live. This is probably true in a word picture too. The myriad undrawn unwritten lines are the ones that hold together what the painter and the writer have tried to set down, their own visions of a thing: a town, one town, this town. LOCATION: 61
Here before me now is my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself, and much that can never be said adds to its reality for me, just as much of its reality is based on my own shadows, my inventions. LOCATION: 67
SO HERE IS the town, founded more than two thousand years ago by the brash Roman invaders, on much older ruins which still stick up their stones and artifacts. I was as brash a newcomer to it, and yet when I first felt the rhythm of its streets and smelled its ancient smells, and listened at night to the music of its many fountains, I said, “Of course,” for I was once more in my own place, an invader of what was already mine. LOCATION: 82
to recognize Aix from my own invisible map of it. LOCATION: 87
MANY old towns like Aix in the Western world have grown the way a pearl does, in micromillimeters of skin against the world, around a germ, an alien seed, an itch, which in most of them has been a Christian church, at once fortress and prison and spiritual core. LOCATION: 118
It is mainly a question of withdrawing to the vanishing point from the consciousness of the people one is with, before one actually leaves. LOCATION: 142
“Away, away,” I answered in a half-deliberately fey manner, and I disappeared from his immediate vision and returned to my family and told them that the reposoirs had been forbidden. LOCATION: 206
THE TWO BEST things for me, in St. Sauveur, were that I was able to know it full and know it empty, not of people but of the spirit. LOCATION: 214
But the thing that was real was the sound. It was awesome, whether from a little flute as single as a pearl, or mighty as Judgment Day from the whole orchestra. Everything was a part of it, and the breath that went into and out of the mortals there, and into and out of the great organ, was in a mystical way the breath of the place itself, very old and ageless. I have seldom felt myself more identified with anything. It was perhaps as if I were the right grain of sand for me to be, on the right beach. LOCATION: 249
The Cours has teased poets and painters with its ineffable allure for more than three hundred years, but words and lines and colors do not capture the reasons why it is beautiful and not pretty, serene and not soothing, and dignified yet gladsome all the year, even in the stripped austerity of winter. LOCATION: 266
It is a man-made miracle, perhaps indescribable, compounded of stone and water and trees, and to the fortunate it is one of the world’s chosen spots for their own sentient growth. LOCATION: 271
It is crowned by three nobly sentimental white stone females representing Justice, Agriculture, and the Arts. The first faces up the Cours, toward the law courts and the prison. The second looks toward Marseille, for rapidly vanishing reasons. The third turns toward Avignon and its older and perhaps even greater culture. LOCATION: 310
To blend in one tangible whole The manifold features of change LOCATION: 343
And it makes a mysterious whole, this generous vital stretch of trees and buildings and live waters. In any language, it cannot rightly be called street, thoroughfare, mall, road or roadway, route, boulevard, highway. It is the Cours. LOCATION: 364
In Aix, and I presume in every other respectable town of France, both great and small, cafés are known by the company they keep, and in one way or another the towns are known by their caf LOCATION: 391
more than tourists, less than townspeople, LOCATION: 451
our strangely permanent impermanence LOCATION: 559
Then they all sat on a stone bench and talked, in the absorbed way possible only to people their age who do not need written languages. LOCATION: 586
Was it not perhaps an emotional gambit for two little strangers to pin their loneliness upon a shadow beckoning to them, making the Sign? LOCATION: 769 NOTE: The gypsy woman embodies the inscrutable sign, the inscrutable other, otherness and strangeness and foreignness embodied.
THERE are myriad facets to invisibility, and not all of them reflect comfort or security. LOCATION: 774
the dispassionate courtesy of the French people. LOCATION: 790
It was not brisk efficiency I wanted for them, but I could not help feeling a kind of cosmic exasperation at their stubborn clinging to patterns which had long since been improved upon. LOCATION: 806
Sometimes it seemed to me that the women I came to know in Aix felt an apparently voluptuous pleasure in exhausting themselves with archaic ceremonies which taxed them almost past remedy. LOCATION: 807
amenable to every drift of meaning. LOCATION: 827
I was forever in their eyes the product of a naïve, undeveloped, and indeed infantile civilization, and therefore I was incapable of appreciating all the things that had shaped them into the complicated and deeply aware supermen of European culture that they firmly felt themselves to be. LOCATION: 836
what occasionally depressed me was that I was assumed to have a deaf ear because I was a racially untutored American instead of simply another human being. LOCATION: 840
In France, almost any empty room in no matter what kind of dwelling, from hovel to mansion, is put to use: it helps pay the taxes, of course, and it salves the instinctive guilt any good Gallic citizen feels about waste of food-space-energy, and waste most of all of what can be called the sense of humanity, or more plainly the basic and instinctive need of people for people. LOCATION: 920
having her like me, Mary Frances, the person who was me-Mary-Frances. LOCATION: 998
Americans, very warm generous naive people, are especially attuned to. Spiritually we are fresh children, unable to realize that other peoples are infinitely older and wearier than we. We do not yet know much world-pain, except vicariously. Europeans who grow bored or exasperated with our enthusiasm are not feeling superior to us, any more than a group of “senior citizens” feel superior as they watch teen-agers rock-and-roll or do the twist. There may perhaps be a little muscular envy in the oldsters, but there is also tolerance and understanding which the young people are as yet incapable of recognizing. LOCATION: 1011
Many things I should long since have known, about both outer and inner worlds, grew clearer to me as I learned that no matter how long I lived nor how many other lives I might be able to cram into my one span, I would never be as old as one of the children in the streets of Aix. LOCATION: 1017
I was the product of a young race of newcomers to a virgin land and must accept every aspect of my racial adolescence. LOCATION: 1019
The sunlight poured in through the beautiful windows, and stripped Madame’s face like a scalpel, seeing viciously into the essence of her, the skin within the skin. LOCATION: 1043
She had inherited or been given as dowry this large elegant undistinguished house, with fireplaces and back-stairs and all the other necessities of well-run domestic slavery; and now the rooms were almost empty of family, thanks to death and taxes, and there were no more slaves. LOCATION: 1046
In a kind of insane denial of reality the women like her (many of them saddled with senile husbands or horribly mutilated sons or unfortunate grandchildren kept as much as possible out of sight), these exhausted women, in background very much like my own aunts and their friends, tried to keep their homes running for “paying guests.” They tried, and doggedly, to pretend that it was really intimates they were sharing their homes with, and kept them bathed in an utterly false atmosphere of well-being and charm and interesting meals. LOCATION: 1049
She was dying, literally dying of fatigue, I thought … and years later she would still be dying of it, although much less plainly as the strain of the war faded. LOCATION: 1065
there we all sat in the luster of this insane bright shell, and I felt a child’s fear and dismay. LOCATION: 1073
I was caught with a blind woman, fighting with courage and stupidity to hold on to shadows. LOCATION: 1074
JUST AS THE waste of human energy in the upper-class landladies of Aix depressed me, so did their deliberate self-dramatization exasperate me. LOCATION: 1078
This always excited Henriette and the maids, who obviously felt more desirable in an atavistic way at the direct approach to sex of the tom. LOCATION: 1093
This blatant maleness, a never-ending titillation to the younger females of the house, interested neither Madame nor Louloute the other cat, and they seemed oddly free and happy when Minet was on the tiles. LOCATION: 1097
She did not even walk through the town like other people; she strode with a kind of cosmic disgust LOCATION: 1132
They grew very dull, in a noisy way, but I always felt ashamed of my ennui in the face of such overt fury, and stolid and undemonstrative and therefore unfeeling. LOCATION: 1149
IT IS UNDERSTANDABLE that a woman fiercely enough disillusioned to curse God, as was Fernande, would find the human beings she must work with beneath her contempt. LOCATION: 1173
They were wasteful and mistaken and hysterically overt, and buffeted as I was by all the noise of their will to survive, I could not but admit, in my loneliest hours, that I was more alive with them than I was anyplace else in my known world. LOCATION: 1251
Henry insisted in the firm simple way of most Anglo-Saxon men that he and I help carry the pram on up. LOCATION: 1295
for several weeks we were somewhat testily teased by Madame about this breach of etiquette: a man of a certain class, and Henry was unmistakably of the top level in his own country, does not assist in any way a man or woman of a lower class than his own. LOCATION: 1296
This was a flat statement. Henry had betrayed his background. I on the other hand as a relatively uncouth American could not be blamed for my breach of breeding and manners, but I might perhaps have learned a lesson LOCATION: 1298
Henry could appreciate this in his own inverted Scandinavian way, but I was, and I remain, somewhat baffled and very repelled by it. It was a conditioned reflex in the fine old lady, which was as natural to her as her need of a fish fork for fish and a game fork for game. LOCATION: 1306
At last with this adamant old woman I was me, Mary Frances LOCATION: 1335
it a test of my powers to remember and to consider, over and past my moments of horror and fright, the few real God-sent healers I have known. They are as rare as hen’s teeth, as are real God-sent men of God. LOCATION: 1349
I liked his detached tenderness, his gift of making me feel reassured and yet held gently off from him, not held off as a female or even a person, but as an object of his care, toward which he must remain ever impersonal and clear-minded. LOCATION: 1411