A vast university
The Louvre at night, August 2005
“The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music… it is worth anyone’s while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.”
— James Thurber
People who love Paris and didn’t love school might not agree with Thurber, but I connected with his description immediately. Or in the words of Joni Mitchell, “…in Paris, I felt unfettered and alive.” The idea of dallying there for years sounds very appealing to me, not least for the chance to practice speaking and hearing one of the world’s most beautiful languages.
I heard a lot of bad press about Paris before I finally went there in 2005, but none of the negative stories turned out to be true. For me, it was one of the most enchanting places I’d ever been. And besides all the things Thurber lists, there’s the FOOD…
Where do you dream of being able to “dally for years?”
One year ago today:
This post was first published seven years ago today. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.
- Posted in: Uncategorized
- Tagged: abundance, art, beauty, cities, culture, excitement, exploration, favorite places, food, French, history, joy, language, learning, literature, music, Paris
Defeat Despair 
That’s a great question, Julia, where i “dream of being able to ‘dally for years?'”
The south of France sounds good, or along the Mediterranean. Or along and in the Mediterranean, with a boat?
The other thought I had was NYC, which would certainly also continue to be an education.
All of those sound good to me too. Along with more others than I can count! Such a big world, so little time…