Rolling off the fog

I'm at the Rodin Museum.

It is beautiful here.

Once I'd purchased my ticket, I was directed out of a door and found myself in a huge garden.

The museum starts by being a garden.

More things should start as gardens.

It is beautiful here.

The flowers--rare roses, peonies, things that bees like and indeed there are bees here--are in verdant late-spring bloom. They line the paths and spread into garden squares on diagonal, four facing in. In the middles are statues, risen like great black metal plumes, each expressing an emotion, and each doing it perfectly.

The garden is huge.

I am still in the garden.

I saw the Thinker and wondered for a moment why the gold shine on the knees and elbows was missing; and then I remembered that of course the shine never happened on the real thing, just on the bookend Thinkers that prop up my dad's dusty paperbacks about music theory.

I took several pictures of the Thinker. His butt is more comically prominent in real life.

Honoré de Balzac was a French author. Rodin did a sculpture of him that stands in the next square, the one after DanteCronusHades. He looks like a stuffed Shakespeare.

The plaque said that when Rodin unveiled the sculpture, it sparked outrage. The plaque doesn't say why. I can only assume Balzac's fans didn't like being reminded that he looked like a taxidermied English playwright.

An American woman near me asks her companion "Who even was Balzac?"

For a moment I consider privately scorning her lack of culture, standing up straighter with the knowledge that I could tell anyone who asked who Balzac was, sight unseen, but then I remind myself that I only know Balzac's name and occupation because he was name-checked by an overeducated Russian boy in conversation with Baba Yaga, in a novel I read once called Egg & Spoon, by Gregory MacGuire. I haven't read a word of Balzac, nor do I intend to. It would be unfair of me to sneer, even just in my head.

Rodin's sculptures are quite beautiful themselves, but this afternoon, I am having a hard time appreciating them. I know they're amazing, well-wrought, expressive; I take pictures of the ones my family would like most. But you see, this afternoon my heart sits heavy with a bout of depression.

I don't know the source. I know it's not the disaster of yesterday, when I lost my ticket on the Metro and ended up between €30 and €80 in debt to the city of Paris. (We find out tomorrow  the price of meeting metro agents that the metroman on the phone said were the most overzealous metro agents he'd ever heard of.) It's not the events of this morning, which were nothing but positive: I got up early and made pancakes for the family, went shopping with Segolene for amazing clothes, and had a nice lunch of leftovers from the dinner the night before.

I don't have a reason to be sad, but I know I don't need one. These strange episodes, where my mind is always preoccupied with nothing preoccupying it, just a swirling vortex of preoccupation with a false center, cannot be dealt with rationally.

I am writing.

I'm sitting on a beautiful old decaying bench of wooden slats set on iron frame set into two pieces of stone that bookend the object.

The space I am in is on the borderland of the Rodin Museum. There are no sculptures here.

There are two sandboxes.

A little bit earlier there was a child here, a baby really, with their parents. It looked very like me as a baby, and it was crawling on the rich soft new grass. I got a nice picture of the huge Colosseum of hedgerows with the baby in the foreground and the Museum showing in the archways.

Happy things now.

I got the Jack White red pants I've always wanted.

I got some gorgeous royal blue pants that suit my cherry-red Docs just fine.

I look like Robin Goodfellow in my new green striped shirt with the collarbone scooped neck and the baggy middle.

Amos Wobber invited me to spend a weekend at his house this summer, listening to the music we text about and seeing the places that shaped us.

My French hosts have been nothing but kind and generous.

I'm meeting my friend Isabel for a drink and a chat later.

My brother Zeke is about to graduate from the United States' preeminent university, and I get to see it all happen.

Thomas Hardy wrote with a clever and gentle humor.

Sally Rooney writes with an expressive expediency to her tone.

People say I write well.

I am in a beautiful garden.

I should go back.