Postscript

 

What a trip!  It was a large collection of many different things, mostly unrelated to each other, except that they took place in France.  From millennia-old art to today's fashions; from a bizarre Abbey on a rock to pilgrim chapels on a cliff; from gardens on a cliff to Chateau gardens manicured to within inch of their lives; from a queen of two different countries to two different mistresses of a fantasy castle on the river; from one invasion north, to another invasion south, nine hundred years later, in the same place, both of which changed the course of history; from the paranoid delusions in a fortress cathedral to the luminous colors of a fantasy chapel; from art about the gritty realism of Paris' seamier side to the unbelievable beauty of a simple lily pond; from the stimulating art of one revolutionary cohort to the deathly rubble of another; from one medieval town to the next to the next; from the Pyrenees to the Loire to the Channel to the Seine - we found history and art wherever we went. 

Hope you enjoyed the ride!  And I'm sorry/not sorry about the long forays into history.  This project has been, first and foremost, a writing exercise for me, one that some other folks have asked to look in on.  I'm happy for this to be a group project, but I'm not writing for anyone other than myself.  Or rather, I'm writing for myself first, and then for others.  Thanks for being one of the others, and I hope that my bunny trails didn't bog you down.

I've been putting this journal/blog together for a very, very long time, and I'm ready to be done.  I envisaged this Postscript as a collection of thoughts, conclusions, observations, and suggestions, but I didn't write any of them down.  They'll come to me again as time goes on.  Meanwhile, I think I'll go do something else for a while.  

Goodbye!