I share their instinct to whine, if not wine. From a newspaper article on the difficulties of re-entry:
The French are like “eternal children who return to school,” said Alix Girod de l’Ain, a columnist at Elle magazine. “There is a sacralization of vacation,” since nearly everyone takes August off, with la rentrée as “an important moment because we officially change our rhythm and enter a new cycle.”And so, to my legions of French readers, I offer this substitute for vacation and sun in the form of an excerpt from a poem (I give and I give sans recompense):
...
Ms. Girod de l’Ain, who asked her readers to decide if they “really need to come back from vacation,” said that the French will recover. “French people like it when it’s sunny and they don’t work,” she said. “But this year the weather was bad, and now we have to start work again.”
Now welcome, summer. With thy sonne softe
Upon my head, the possibilities
Of pure escape again begin to haunt me--
Like June, say, in the higher Pyrenees.
I would depart for Zanzibar tomorrow,
Save for a qualm or two. There is, of course,
Always the thought that, if an ass goes traveling,
Proverbially he'll not come back a horse.
There is the man who journeyed to Beersheba
And cried out, "'Tis all barren!" So when I
Notice the look of flowering around me
And feel this qualm about a change of sky,
Then I remember. There are other tourists,
More like Thoreau who laughed at Zanzibar
As somewhere full of cats, yet chose to travel
Farther to Walden where the cattails are.
Or like that global Mr. White of Selborne
Who wrote a guidebook, journeys out of June,
Full of such planetary shine and wonder
As hoot owls hooting in B-flat, in tune;
A swallow in the air; a flight of lapwings;
The hayricks of July; the August field
Where harvest bugs walk up and bite the ladies.
And there it is, the perfect trip revealed--
A tour of world affairs with summer in it,
Priced modestly, in my own dooryard, Oh,
Even the vision of that prophet Daniel,
Who dreamed that 'Many shall run to and fro
And knowledge shall be increased!' yields to my vision!
For what some find in Tanganyika some
Find in a book--and stay at home to read it,
Maintaining thus an equilibrium.
I plan to travel, therefore, in this region
Among the lilies, like a bibliophil,
Though neither book, nor swallow, makes a summer,
The poet says. No doubt a dozen will...
-Helen Bevington, from "When Found, Make a Verse Of"
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