Monastic of the Day!

(Not him, obviously. But weren't the 80s ghastly, though?
Leggings and miniskirts, oh my.
And a headband, no less!)

In what seems to be becoming a regular feature here, today's featured religious* is the Venerable Mère Marie de l'Incarnation, 1599-1672, who started out this life in Tours and departed it in an Ursuline convent in New France, which is alot like Québec only with a great deal fewer Frites-Alors, much less poutine, and not even close to as much or as many habitant and habitants.

Both sides of my family, the French ones and the English ones, came over to North America early. This could mean they were desperate, adventurous, bored, reckless, in danger of incarceration, excessively fond of lengthy boat travel, or all these in varying measures. I know a lot about the English side: they fought in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and sent letters telling about this. I know less about the earliest French arrivals, and I suspect it is because they are the ones who gave the women in our family the facial hair, and the less known about them, the less rancour towards the dead will arise. Still, though, I love the history of Québec/New France/Nouvelle France as much as I love that of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, so while rummaging around online for stuff about the former, I was reminded of the story of the Filles du Roi, in which the above Mother Marie played a part.

(The Roi Whose Filles We're Talking About.
Somehow this style never caught on in Trois-Rivières.
They were still probably wearing headbands.)

Firstly, it should be said that Filles du Roi are not at all the same as filles de joie, who figured in earlier posts and had far better wardrobes, not to mention restaurant choices, even after Escoffier, than the habitants of the Canadian wilderness.

(As you can see from the rug and the furniture
in this painting by honorary Canadian Cornelius Krieghoff,
imported spouses were also forced to endure shopping at Ikea, which was
even more horrific when Karl XI

was in charge of Sweden
than it is now.)

Unlike filles de joie, Filles du Roi were not career women; their job - once they moved to the New World and found a husband (which tended to happen within a month or so after disembarkation) - was to be a wife and mother, which, alongside religious and camp-follower, was one of the three main career trajectories available to women at the time. Despite the arduous passage across the Atlantic, New Franceian Hausfrau could well have seemed the middle-ground option for marriageable girls with a moderate, though not overweening, sense of adventure and a similarly underwhelming set of marriage prospects.

The Filles du Roi were recruited and imported from 1663 to 1673, beginning in northern cities like Paris, Rouen, and New Rochelle. The purpose of the programme was to populate the colony, which would eventually provide new soldiers to defend France's holdings against Iroquois and English alike. Moreover, having a wife, family, house, land - not to mention livestock, two barrels of salted meat, and dowry from the King - would in theory serve to keep more of the colony's male population where they were instead of following the trend of leaving New France to return home after their three years of service. Though there were only 700, or 852, or 1000 women shipped in during those years, the French population of New France was itself only about 2500 in 1663 (as contrasted with English North America, which already had 100,000 inhabitants), with only 1 percent of New France territory being used by the settlers, so the resulting marriages and considerable progeny (you only got a 300-livre annual pension if you stalled at 10 children, but 400 if you made it past a clean dozen) could indeed eventually constitute a relatively significant bulwark against English encroachment once the children reached soldiering age. In 1671 alone, about 700 babies were born to the new families, and by the end of the ten-year importation of Filles du Roi, the sex ratio in Nouvelle France was more or less even. By 1754, at the start of the Seven Years' War, or the Fourth Intercolonial War, or the Guerre de la Conquête, or the 'French and Indian War,' the 'Indians' at least had some Frenchmen to fight alongside them.

All that notwithstanding.



Some of the girls were not as ready for the privations of Canadian homesteading as were others. They got a quick remedial education in whatever practical domestic arts they lacked while awaiting introduction to suitable suitors, plus a ration of pins, needles, thread, taffeta, and scissors among other things. They did not, however, receive a pair of Sorels or experience in wood-chopping or fence-building. Just as the Filles preferred garçons who already had une habitation set up and ready for move-in (look, I love the Canadiens as much as you do and, honestly, probably more so, but that really is the boring reason they're called The Habs: steady settlers with land and a cabin. Homesteaders. Pea soup. Stability and stoicism, not high-sticking), the male colonists were in need more of a sturdy helpmeet than a piano-playing bourgeoise.

Enter Marie Guyart the Ursuline.

(And also another entry, since this one got away from me.)


*And for the irreligious among you, 'religious' in the nominative way is different than the adjectival version. Flat-earthers, for example, or snake-charming charismatics, no matter how ardent their faith in their faith, would only be adjectivally religious, i.e., religious people, a religious population, rather than 'a religious' like Mother Marie, who took vows/joined an order/consecrated her life. It's not biased language, I assure you, and it certainly doesn't prove the earth isn't flat.

Matteo Ricci, Mandarins, and Moksha...

So, R. gave me a copy of What Makes You Not a Buddhist, which is a brilliant little book that brilliantly feeds into my particular prejudices, except that it lays out a solid argument for what I get too cranky to articulate beyond the level of whininess. Moreover, it is written by a Tibetan Buddhist, and 'Tibetan Buddhism' is at the moment the preferred flavor for those who are too young to have been 'Zen' before its huarache-wearing disciples were supplanted by 'Tibetan' flocks in Tevas and Birkenstocks. What binds the two groups beyond their shared fondness for open-toed shoes is a distaste for 'organized religion,' 'dogma,' and a purportedly mediated experience of the Divine, as well as the sense that what they perceive as lacking in Christianity can be found in a bastardized version of a tradition that, being exotic, they have no bad memories of.


I have been wanting to write a semi-sensible rant on this for a while, because it ties together Chesterton and the Dalai Lama, which not so many things do, really, if you think about it, and also because it fleshes out to an extent what I have said about the secularized (and thus inaccurate/irrelevant) and largely pernicious vestiges of Calvinism that haunt even a stolid, fourth-generation atheist in this country. What Chesterton had to say on the one hand was this little nugget: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.' In The Everlasting Man he also said this:

'They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best thing is to be far away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.'

And the reverse of the vantage point of that Confucian to a distant and exotic Christianity is what we take with us as we look at Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism specifically. Our parents never threatened us with bardo if we misbehaved; we were never disappointed with Tara if our entreaties to the Eternal appeared to go unanswered. We can approach Buddhism with open arms and hearts because we have no (substantive or distorted) history with it, whereas we cannot even view a (likewise quite distant) thirteenth-century Christian contemplative from a perspective untainted by our views on the Reformation, the Inquisition, colonialism, or even every terrible or just mediocre pastor or believer we've ever known.



Chesterton again:

'The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda' (super-double-bold-italics mine).

But metaphors can only go so far, and I would quibble with Chesterton's only to the extent that even as our Londoner looks more charitably on a Confucian or a pagoda than he does on a Christian or a cathedral, he still does so ineluctably from the balcony of his apartment or the front porch of his Georgian, or Queen Anne, or 'Tuscan' home. He comes into life with a Judeo-Christian weltanschauung from within which he can never fully remove himself, however many embroidered Hill Tribe jackets his closet holds. Whatever sympathy he may find himself to hold for the precepts of karma and moksha, and whether he decides he ascribes more to the concept of atman or of anatman, he is, like Matteo Ricci under his Confucian silks, ever and always a Westerner, regardless of the extent to which he claims, or purports to reject, his own spiritual heritage.


As the Dalai Lama asserted many times in the 1994 John Main Seminar (The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus), though there are many similarities between teachings in the Gospels and Buddhist works, just as there is no one type of man, nor no one type of spirituality or spiritual practice suited to every individual equally, there can be no one tradition that incorporates all the teachings of all the world. The Trinity is not equal to the three kayas - but there are 'parallels and similarities,' just as there are between mahabrahman and the Christian God when viewed in His aspect as ultimate ground of being. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that reaching too far abroad for spiritual insight frequently creates more confusion in the seeker than wisdom or equanimity. To gloss over these significant differences and the culturally-specific origins of Tibetan Buddhism is to demean both the Tibetan tradition and the Western would-be bhikku. What he likely adopts under these conditions is neither Christianity nor Buddhism. He cannot extricate himself from his patrimony - however ill understood it may be in his case - nor can he successfully through sheer force of will insert himself into the story of millennia of Himalayan spiritual inheritance. He begins with misunderstanding his own religion and ends with exoticising, romanticising, cheapening - and misunderstanding - a different one.

I didn't get to the eminently sensible Buddhism book (written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, originally from Bhutan). But now I fully intend to, since I was at least able to start. This has been simmering a long time. Like, years and years. It's good to let it go.

Coherent Narratives (in Life, friends, not here.)

Caution: This entry says nothing of consequence about anything of consequence. Things of substance, written somewhat coherently, are elsewhere; skip ahead or back if you want one of those. If you like your logic loose, loopy, and slapdash, read on.

...At any rate, Dominicans being everywhere does not mitigate the fact that the last place I would expect to find one in my blog is IN-in my blog, but it seems you can't escape them with anything near the sort of regularity and indeed predictability with which we routinely fail to bump into Cistercians at the Circle K (do Circle K's still exist? I used to buy my Now 'n' Laters there, and once got a Bit o' Honey with a mosquito half-embedded in the top), but Fr. Fones, of prudential-judgment-and-politics, whom/which you'll remember from a few posts back, left a lovely comment about one of my posts about poverty.

But that's not what I'm getting to. Although, if only more people would comment, that would be great. Although, 'more people commenting' does presuppose someone is reading, and I think that is where the whole idea sort of loses a bit of steam.

At any rate.

Unlike a journal entry or emails, I try to afford those nonexistent readers of my blog the courtesy not only of a concluding sentence, but often a good title, too, when something strikes me. This allows me to believe, by framing the post so nicely, that there is indeed a middle thus framed, leaving me free of guilt and able to carry on with outfit-coordination for another day.

However.

Dominicans were called sometimes, by some, in certain parts, the Black Friars, or the Blackfriars, due, unsurprisingly, to their wearing of a black outergarment. And Shakespeare's (well, partly Shakespeare's) Blackfriars Theatre in London is on the site of a 13th-century Dominican monastery which, after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in England, France, and Wales in the 16th century, had very few friars of any color left in it.

That fact notwithstanding.

I was trying to trying to come up with something vaguely amusing for the title here. Now, stepping up another century, the Black Robes were the Jesuits, the Sulpicians, and the Récollets in New France. But mostly the Jesuits. I could use 'black robe' if I gave it a twist. But I lacked a twist.

So at this point (in the naming of one stupid blog entry!) we have: Dominicans, Shakespeare, England, egomaniacal homicidal kings, Québec, Jesuits, and the color black. Which is a lot of things, but not much to work with. So I looked up stuff on the author of Black Robe, the Belfast native Brian Moore, who also wrote Judith Hearne, which became The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne with Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins, which I did not see and have nothing funny to say about.

But Black Robe also became a movie about two centuries after bad King Henry, when in 1991 it was directed by Bruce Beresford, who had previously directed Driving Miss Daisy, which is about slow driving and a slow-building relationship. Black Robe happily retained in film form many of the difficult moral issues of the book. And it had Lothaire Bluteau, of Jesus of Montréal fame, in the lead as Fr. Laforgue, whose deep faith leads him to great courage. It's one of my favorite films, and is at times unbearably beautiful and at others unbearably disturbing.

Which of course has nothing to do with Dominicans. Inconveniently.

However, it turns out that that when he died in 1999 (in Malibu, which is far, far away from Shakespeare and the Algonquins of either 1600s-Québec or 1920s-New-York-City type), Moore was working on a novel based on the life of Arthur Rimbaud, while in 1984 his screenplay for Simone de Beauvoir's (a thinky, ethical risking-her-life-for-the-good-of-others atheist if ever there were one) Le Sang des Autres, her novel about the French Resistance, was made into an American film by French director Claude Chabrol. And is said to be ungreat.

But to go back a century now, Arthur Rimbaud, while probably more anti-religion than either Mr. Moore or Mme. de Beauvoir, and not one to trouble himself overmuch with ethical problems - from gun-running (and some biographers say slave-running, as well) to stealing people's husbands - was, despite all that and his early death and even earlier renunciation of poetry-writing (at 20), one of the most influential poets in modern times.

Which brings us to me, as the stupid URL of this blog, oisive-vitesse (which only exists because I couldn't get vifargent) (who only has one post, by the way, from 2004), which is a very stupid pun on a very famous Rimbaud poem and also has to do with my driving style, which could very well be characterized (by a gentle person, charitable of heart and tolerant by nature) as 'relaxed,' or 'easy-going.'

The line I bastardized is from the poem 'La chanson de la plus haute tour,' and goes something like this:

'Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J'ai perdue ma vie.
Ah! Que le temps viennent
Où les coeurs s'éprennent.'

And likewise something like this:

'Idle youth
Enslaved to everything,
Through sensitivity
I have wasted my life.
Oh! Let the time come
When hearts open up.'

Which is ungraceful, but there you go. You get what you pay for. Anyway, 'oisive' means lazy, even though birds are anything but. Sort of like Canadian Smarties, which are no longer made by Rowntree and are basically sweeter M & M's, with nothing acidic or 'smarty' about them. And I'm not a lazy driver, but I'm sure it looks like either the car or I must be at times. Still, I have remembered this stanza always (I have no idea what the rest of the poem says) not just because I like the redemptive hope of the last line, not if such a time comes, but when (literally 'where,' but we'll not trouble ourselves excessively with that for now; the certainty holds either way), but also because it can seem sometimes that all our youthful passion for fifty thousand different things simultaneously could have been wasted.

I don't think it is. I think we take it with us. I think perhaps one has to reach a certain age to be able to look back and see just how shockingly coherent the narrative of our lives is. Maybe the aggregate of facts simply has to be large enough to let the pattern emerge. All my childhood obsessions I still have, if sometimes in mitigated form. All my tastes and predilections (except those for footed pjyamas and tea with sugar) remain about the same, with some accommodation for education and fine-tuning (I no longer want literally to live in a genie bottle; I'm content to hang a Moroccan lantern inside, and string some curtains around, my bateau ivre of a bed and call it done), and I'm most satisfied or content when I have some version of the things that made me happiest as a child and adolescent - down to the bottle full of buttons I spent countless hours sorting and resorting on my grandmother's floor. I don't think it's wasted; I think we just sometimes take too long to realize what it taught us about ourselves.

Personally, I Love that Santa Claus Joke

But I'm an idiot, so it stands to reason. Also I still love the one from a Christmas cracker about a million Christmases ago, wherein the psychologist asks the patient how long he has thought he was a dog. The patient replies, 'Depuis que je suis chiot,' which was even funnier to me when I thought that 'chiot' meant sheep, which gives you a significant and no doubt chilling insight into my desperate sense of humor.

And since you didn't ask, and since the only joke I've put on here was the ghastly one about Santa Claus and pizza, here's an equally well-traveled one about Jesuits and Dominicans (there are millions, I assure you, and at times the Dominicans get the upper hand instead):


A Jesuit (sometimes it's a Franciscan or something else) and a Dominican were debating about whose order was the greater. After months of arguing, they decided to ask for an answer from God when they died. Years later, they met in heaven and decided to go to the throne of God to resolve their old disagreement. God seemed a bit puzzled about the question and told them he would reply in writing a few days later. After much deliberation, God sent the following letter:

My beloved children,

Please stop bickering about such trivial matters. Both of your orders are equally great and good in my eyes.

Sincerely yours,

God, S.J.

"'There is no man,'

[Elstir] began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded....We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.'" (Proust, Within a Budding Grove)


I pray to God it is not that I am 'growing accustomed to,' or acquiescing in, or failing any longer to notice, the winter such that I can no longer naturally and effortlessly be as splenetic as I have every right to be. After all, it is only the beginning of February, I am nearly at the 49th parallel, and thus there are many, many more weeks of short, dark days made darker by an unremitting low-hanging grey sky. I may have plenty to be thankful for, but there is still much to lament. At least for another eight weeks or so. And while I think equanimity in the face of some hardship is a hallmark of maturity, I think the Dylan Thomas approach is perhaps the sanest when choosing one's coping mechanisms for Northern winters. It may not perceptibly change objective reality, but you'll feel more alive after screaming in the snowy woods, and the slight elevation in blood pressure may help warm you up a bit.

Mature? Perhaps not; perhaps so. I think denial is in the main unduly demonized. Yes, we need a scapegoat, clearly, for the world's ills, but I remain unconvinced that it has to be the one that lets the individual get on with life! Rage, rage, fine; play a little hockey, hit the heavy bag, burn off some angst and cabin fever snowshoeing or sitting on a foreign beach pretending it's not still dismal where you're heading back to in 6.5 days 4 hours and 36 minutes -- and then go back to work, get back to living and resume waiting for April. Nothing is solved, obviously, but scant little generally is, and still somehow we manage to put our boots on the right feet again and get out the door.

That perhaps is the true model of maturity: getting on with it. Accepting that at times it truly is every bit as wretched as it seems and still having the courage and audacity (and, I will maintain, 'denial,' as it is popularly used) to put the boots on once more and head out into it. Certainly existentialists, whether of a Christian or atheistic bent, would stand with me there. Taking the nihilo, sticking an ex- in front of it, and finding within oneself what can be made of it.

Still, as Proust reminds us, we were not always wise, and if we have attained to any measure of wisdom now we might well look back on one or two habits or inclinations of our youth and wince. I was reminded of this today in a conversation about some film now out, which I thought I remembered as having Jeremy Irons in it - Jeremy Irons, who was once something different, or so I like to believe, but who has now become to films of the Double-Aughts what Michael Caine was to films of the Eighties and early Nineties: to wit, the scrubby, middle-aged Englishman who will take any part in any American film, no matter how bad the part, no matter how meritless the film.

I wouldn't care were it not the case that Jeremy Irons, along with Charlie Rose, Sartre, and William F. Buckley, were my Deep Dark Crushes of middle high school through early college. I adored that Buckley loved and wrote passionately about words despite all his other interests and careers; I loved that Rose's interviews were longer and more in-depth than the norm but that he was always even-tempered and polite; Sartre is an obvious and not uncommon one; but in contrast to all those I suspect that my Irons crush was based solely on the fact that regardless of role he was always effete, etiolated, and wan. He could take any part he wished, and still look and act completely morbidly tubercular in it. For me that was sufficient base for an abiding passion at the time.

Now of course, the stages of my psychosexual development having passed through such 'fatuous or unwholesome incarnations' as the foregoing, I must admit I do indeed feel quite mature by comparison in my quest for the six-foot Jesuit-schooled, Indian-riding, multilingual, finish-carpenter sailboat-racing poetry lover with a thing for Stravinsky, skirts, Mastiffs and Malagasy prosimians...

Wrack and Pillion

Right, so if we accept the fact that I have no market, that I am, in the voice of my scratchy-tee-shirt-creating friend's blown-up Times New Roman scream 'INCOMPATIBLE' in an elegantly intransitive way, what am I supposed to do? If there is, as I am increasingly persuaded is the case, exactly no demographic for the Product that is me, then how many cats should I ultimately have, and at what age is it most seemly to start acquiring them?

I mean, here's the deal. Dating is, for good or ill - and I do have my opinions on this, but they do not matter in the slightest - the process of advertising what it is one thinks to be his or her greatest selling points to those individuals s/he has deemed to be within his or her market demographic, while simultaneously assessing the claims of desirability proferred by that same population. Maybe you need to marry a fellow Jew, maybe your spouse must have attained at least a Master's degree, maybe you just really like blondes. The gravity of these necessary or desirable characteristics varies. It has, moreover, become clear to me during my brief sojourn into Internet dating that how wide the pool of potential partners individuals believe themselves to be drawing from varies significantly, as well. In other words, some people will not waste their time with anyone who is not a Libran Lutheran real-estate developer with grey hair and green eyes on a raw-foods diet who prefers Scrabble over poker and Bakhtin over Baudrillard. Others, by contrast, hope to find a non-leprotic member of the opposite sex who does not immediately try to kill them.

There are a million variables that go into deciphering - not the Ideal, because that's easy (6'2" and above, shaved and pleasingly-shaped head, cow eyes, PhD in Continental Phil or a Doctor of Divinity who nonetheless passionately appreciates the performing arts, well-toned arms the better to drape my delicate ones over, collects and rides vintage Indians, emotionally adroit and verbally fearsome, wears work clothes non-self-reflexively, tans easily and seldom burns, is possessed of a North African nose and fullish lips, owns neither 'polo shirts' nor 'flipflops,' and whether or not he has one speaks never, ever, ever, of an 'avid yoga practice') - but rather the Desirable and, failing that, the Minimum Acceptable. Moreover, when it comes to dealing with actual people, whatever variables and emphases one has placed in either of these two categories tend to be more fluid in practice than they had seemed initially in the Excel chart. You may find it possible for Jane's industriousness at lovemaking to compensate for her apathy as regards housemaking, or you might eventually stop noticing John's weak chin after listening to him drunkenly recite ten Shakespeare sonnets consecutively. It ends up not being very scientific for most people in the end.

I guess that's 'chemistry,' and I couldn't be bothered. I can't get to the Chemistry Phase because I can't stand anyone long enough to endure the phases leading up to it. The Irrelevant and Hyperbolic Flattery Phase, the Self-Aggrandizement via Recountings of Accomplishments I Could Not Even in an Alternate Universe Care About Phase, the Surely It's Time by Now Groping Phase and, my least favorite, the I Really Thought We Had Something Special There What's Wrong with You Girl Phase.

And I think we all, and I for my part certainly do, make accommodations. In deft acts of self-deluding algebra we optimistically cube portents of 'affability' or 'gentleness' or 'emotional intellect' while dividing by their square roots all behavioral auguries of 'unreflective,' 'melancholic,' or 'rash.' When we find something we like, we naturally focus on that and allow the low-level nasty things to recede in our consciousness. This is how you end up a year later being shocked when your boyfriend 'does the mature thing' and 'opens up' to 'share his emotions' -- and the only 'emotion' he sees fit to share is the one where it's not about you, you're really wonderful really, and pretty and untiringly kind, as well, but it's just that there's a feeling of loss he can't seem to shake, and he really thinks he should address this, should tuck in and knuckle down and take care of it, this bereftness he and his inner child now feel that before getting entangled with you he failed to 'play the field' sufficiently to preclude his daily longing for that idyllic field now...

But leaving aside both the past and bald Gauloises-smoking retired Jesuits turned art critic social workers with a sideline in oldschool philology and research on the Generation of '27 not to mention lofty ethics and ancient but shiny motorbikes, we end up, yet again, here. Which, presumably, since I don't have the twenty-seven cats yet, is not nearly as horrific as what's to come. Which is irrelevant, of course, since I don't even want the twenty-seven cats; the twenty-seven cats are a sop, or a consolation prize, or a hideous metonym for What I Can't Have, What Ever Eludes Me, All That I'll Never Ever Ever Get But Keep Wanting Until I Fill the Hole With Felids. And perhaps as well with a set of long-discontinued China that I spend decades laboriously accumulating piece by piece. If all goes as I fully expect it to, at some point in my dotage I'll revert indeliberately to 'Miss' and the circle will be completed, no more cards will need to be read, and the cats, bless them, will in their hunger pick my (brittle, since I couldn't afford the meds) bones clean once I'm no longer opening the Friskies for us to share, having long ago spent what few shekels remained of my oisive jeunesse à tout asservie, back when I still believed I should or could or would date, or fall in love, or engage in even a vague simulacrum of what I then considered to be 'meaningful conversation' before I descended the mountain (or in this case the creaky stairs of my tenement) one last time and admitted that Yes, par délicatesse I had indeed perdu ma vie.