What Rough Beast

There's nothing I enjoy more than debasing Yeats' quotes by suggesting that even his most intense images somehow have something to do with me. It's shameless, I know, but even so it's a ton of fun to imagine that The Second Coming was written with my trip to Europe in mind. Try it:

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I like to imagine that there will be something at least a little “blood-dimmed tide”- y about my exploits, but I already know that I’m more likely to end up overpaying for water without ice in some tourist-trap café than vexing anything to nightmare.

Anyway, to get to the point, the reason I’m making this blog is not particularly original. Like millions of Francophiles before me, I will be making the pilgrimage to Paris to study for a year, and want some [lazy, convenient] way to share my experience with those back home who care. I don’t know for sure how I expect this to turn out, but I imagine that there will be some pictures (which reminds me, I need to get a camera…), some anecdotes, and the usual amount of nonsense. I will, however, try to keep the navel-gazing to a minimum.

I leave for New Haven on August 8th and then Paris on the 29th, and I will be sure to keep you updated.