WE WILL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

This will be my last post until next week, as I am getting ready to fly to the West Coast to see my son, Patrick, his wife Diana Schneider, and my two grandchildren, Samuel [three and a half] and Athena [just turned one.] Samuel is now talking a blue streak, so I will for the first time be able to have a conversation with him.



Casting about for something to blog about as I go out the door, I came upon a story in today's NY TIMES, about an obviously very wealthy couple, Linda and Bryant Edwards, who have just renovated an apartment on the rue du Cloitre Notre Dame, on the Ile de la Cite. This caught my eye, because I know that little street very well. If you are standing in front of Notre Dame, with the hordes of tourists, looking up at the magnificent facade, rue du cloitre Notre Dame is just to your left, running along the north side of the cathedral. Until recently, this street was the home of Le Vieux Bistro, an unprepossessing little restaurant with the best boeuf Bourguignonne in the entire world. Now, alas, the restaurant has disappeared. The Edwards' apartment is on the first floor, which means one flight up, overlooking the lovely syacmore shaded park behind Notre Dame and a stone's throw from the little bridge that connects ile de la Cite with ile St. Louis.

The apartment is described in the story as 160 square meters, or 1723 square feet. That is vast as Paris apartments go -- about five times the size of our pied-a-terre across the river on the Left Bank. Of course, their apartment is in what is described as a 1905 Haussmann building, and ours is in a seventeenth century building looking out on an interior courtyard. But the Edwards' place is pretty obviously very classy.

All of this made me especially eager to get back to Paris. We will be leaving in just under four weeks, for a three week stay, coming back in time for me to begin lecturing on The Thought of Karl Marx in the Osher Lifelong Learning Program at Duke. Fortunately, I shall be able to continue blogging from Paris. One of the weird things ab out the web is that geographic distance has no significance. The chap who contacted me from Riga might just as well have been down the block. It is going to take a few years for this remarkable fact to percolate through our understanding of the world, but as it does, it will turn a great many things upside down, aesthetically, religiously, and socially, as well as politically.

So, to those of you who have found your way to this site, stay with me, and I shall be back on line next Tuesday. Meanwhile, contact Organize for America [http://www.mybarackobama.com, ]join up to go to a congressional town hall meeting in your district, and help to counterbalance the organized Republican thugs who are once again attempting to hijack democracy in America.