Chance

Chancehas played such a strong role in my life, that I feel no amazement when Ireflect upon the remarkable manner in which it presided over my birth.  One could say that this is everyone’sstory.   But not everyone has theopportunity to tell their story.

          And if everyone did, there would be no great harm in that.  Each person’s experience is the treasure ofall.

KEY:

Text:  Gerard de Nerval,  Walks and Memories IV (Juvenalia)(1854), (trans.Marc Lowenthal), published in Aurelia and Other Writings, Boston, ExactChange,  1996.

Picture 1:   Ellsworth Kelly, ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira lehasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance)’, New York LimitedEditions Club, 1992.

Picture 2:  Mr. and Mrs. MikeTodd and Michael and Christopher Wilding. This picture was taken on my fourth birthday.

Walks And Memories (Nerval)

  

     Thereis no more use thinking about it.  I will never be a landowner;  andyet, how many times on the 8^th or the 15^th of eachquarter (around Paris, at any rate), have I sung the refrain of M. Vautour:

Whenone does not have enough to pay one’s rent

Onemust have a house of one’s own!

     I would have constructed such a light building in thisvineyard!  . . . A little villa in the style of Pompeii, with an impluvium and a cella, something like the house of the tragic poet.  PoorLaviron, who died at the walls of Rome, had drawn out the plan for me.– Yet, totell the truth there are no landowners  on the hills of Montmartre. One cannot legally establish ownership on this terrain undermined by thecavities populated by mammoths and mastodons on their inner walls.  Thetown concedes a right of possession which expires after a hundred years. ..  They are camped out like Turks; and the most progressive tenet wouldhardly contest such a transient claim, in which the right of inheritance cannotbecome established at length. *



*Certain landowners repudiate this detail,something which I have heard others affirm.  Would this not also result inusurpations similar to those which gave back hereditary fiefs under HuguesCapet!

 NOTES:

 

     1. Excerpt from Gerard de Nerval, Walks andMemories (1854) (trans. Marc Lowenthal), published in Aurelia and OtherWritings, Boston, Exact Change,  1996.

     

     2.  Illustrations:

Top: Alvin Langdon Coburn, Moor Park, Rickmansworth, 1914.

Center: Brassai, Chez Suzy, Rue Gregoire de Tours, 1932.

Below: Diego Velasquez, Villa Medici, Façade of the Grotto Loggia, 1630.