Friday

Handke now examining mushrooms----in depth! and all over his basin.  Thoreau would be proud (I think, don't know if he also scoured for mushrooms but surely he must have.  Handke shows us what attention finds.  His centering focus on his landscape amazes this reader.  Just when you think you will doze off and dismiss and skip ahead the 

5:43 pm Friday March 20

Just finished My Year in No-Man's Bay, is it our first and only suburban epic?  Handke manages to end it most marvelously, a magnificent gathering up and repetition of all the motifs and themes and crochets and images and threads from the whole year.  Jan-Dec 1993 fictionalized as 1999 and so a millennial epic to end the eon with joy and song.  Birds, bees, beasts, grasses, flowers, trees, ladders, beggars, silhouettes. Metamorphosis.  

Porchefontaine is a neighborhood in the south-east of Versilles, in Yvelines department of France.  

It was a living working class residential area. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood declined in activity and population.

It features a tiny downtown, two schools, a sports complex, a camping, and a green space that is surrounded by the Versailles, Satory, and Meudon woods.

The neighborhood has a small station served by the RER C.  

Metamorphosis.    Wonder if he made up the Bar des Voyageurs?  Renamed one of the bars there?

Now, if I ever return to Paris, I will have to do that silly thing of looking for all the places he talks about in the book, retrace all of his steps, as if that would be possible.  Better to allow it all to be in the book.  

"But the only vision I know is reconciliation. . . . The great are those who make peace exciting, not war.  Homer today would sing the epic of the souvlake eaters on the train from Corinth to Athens."  "How certain I am, even in the world's worst times, that everything is different. . . . And on yet another morning: Even if human history should come to an end soon, even in terror, something will have taken place in that history, from the beginning, and will have continued steadily, so glorious, so childlike, so gripping, so interconnected that it could happen only once; as human history in the universe could not possibly be better and more beautiful.  God does not see me because I do not let myself be seen by him.  Hair-root wind, from-the-ground wind, Habakkuk wind: it is still there, it still exists.  The omega, the last letter of the ancient alphabet, has the form of a jump rope."    466

I underlined and marked many places in the last ten or so pages of the book.  He gives it a great finale.  Longeurs yes of course and entirely worth it.