Italian sojourns have become my secret travel vice, ever since my exchange student days in Milan. A day in to the Venice leg of the honeymoon reminded me again of this fact - and no sooner than the hour-long vaporetto ride that introduced Wendy & I to the deserted nightlife of post-ferragosto Lido, an accompanying island to Venice. After a semi-restful first night (Wendy's introduction of the paperback thriller "Angels & Demons" kept me turning pages later than I would have liked), the adventure took us by water taxi around to Piazza San Marco and the center of Venice. 10 hours later, we were happily fed (pasta, pizza, frittata mista, and gelattoed out), newly dressed (a wonderful present of a shirt from Wendy and other close calls for her too numerous to list), monumented (the impressive Doge's Palace with an equally superb temporary exhibit on Venice's connection to the muslim world through history), and walked out (including narrow lanes and bridges). Venice by foot is truly a pleasure.
Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...
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