The Gentle Art of Civilized Living Reaches the Highest Degree of Perfection

Yesterday, I woke up at 4:15 and by 5AM was on the road to Boston for my visa appointment at the French consulate. The drive was gorgeous along Routes 43 and 22 -- mist coming up from the fields and spilling across the road and crows flying through it, great twisted trees by the river, farmhouses and heath. By the time I got to I90, the sun was up and the road was zippy and clear almost all the way. Sat in traffic for the last 45 minutes and negotiated the toll plaza crunch with aplomb. My exit got me one street off the Park Building, and I found a space right in front.

The French consulate is tucked away at the end of a hall on the 7th floor, flanked by a number of corporate offices. First revelation as the elevator doors parted: a huge Williams banner. Turns out the Williams Investment Office is also on Park Building 7th. Kansas, Toto?

I stood with an old Italian man and his son as we waited for the consulate to open. The father had spent 6 years living in Paris, and was at the consulate to collect his pension check. They advised me, in one accent unintelligible and the other distinctly Guido, that Paris was a great city.

Once in, the visa appointment took all of ten minutes and was conducted in English. Like cake. After which, I was free to roam the city. I knew I was near Copley Square, and thus the public library, and after filling up the meter (strategy: buy 15 cent peppermint patties, pay for parking with the change), I followed my nose over one street and up. I followed my eyes to an ornate church all in red brick - Trinity - which was in fact back on the street where I'd begun, and directly facing the library.

Mom had passed on Dad's injunction to visit the Sargent murals (restored!) in the Boston Public, but first I detoured into its current exhibition, vintage travel posters advertising all sorts of exotic locales. "Away We Go!", with posters from the 1920s-50s, featured gorgeous color:



and oddly unappealing taglines:



Also, the incredible story of the Paricutin Volcano, whose birth was witnessed by a farmer in Mexico in 1943 - within a week of the eruption, in what was then a cornfield, the volcano reached a height of five stories. Over eight years, it gained 1400 feet.



Amid invocations of exotic locales and village cultures, mine eye espied this sterling sophisticate:



All while playing "See The USA in Your Chevrolet" and Fred Astaire on "Flying Down to Rio."

After poking around the gallery and the courtyard, I headed up the main starcaise, flanked by lions, to the "Puvis de Chavannes Gallery," the second floor corridor whose walls are covered by murals of the nine muses, executed by the aforementioned artist. My pamphlet informs me that the muses are hailing a male figure "representing the 'Genius of Enlightenment'." I do not know whether they mean genius in the modern or Johnsonian sense.

I wandered into a ballroom with fireplace and dark wainscoting and checkered floors ("of Istrian and red Verona marble"). I learned all these things later from pamphlets - I have also learned that it is possible to be married in the Boston Public Library, either in the Abbey Room (the ballroom) or the Bates Reading Room, which spans the length of the building:



I spent an hour here. The inspiration attendant on such a setting is incomprehensible to the self who works on a bunged-up PC in Sawyer Library with its industrial tans and rubber and failing carpets. Long wooden tables and green lampshades enable sketching and marveling and a sense of beautiful, shared scholasticism. Everyone around me is reading or writing, except for two Asian girls (sisters?) at the table to my left. They are busily and efficiently applying makeup, observing one another like mirrors (twins?). One catches me staring. I switch to sketching architecture. I draw a very nice chair back that Dad might've done. I'd show it, but the camera cord eludes me. As does the time. Tune in soon for church history, Sargent murals, dioramas, street photography, and a wading pool. Plus a short rant on the sexual marketing of childhood and more York patties! Don't miss it.

Boston's wonderful.