Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9408170006
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Geoff Seamans
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
On the occasion a few weeks ago of my wife's and my first trip to Gallic climes, in other words, it helped mightily that others in the party of 12 knew a language that I don't.
In the vocabulary department, anyway, it also helped that William of Normandy turned out to be William the Conqueror instead of William the Vanquished. After he led the Normans to victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, they stayed in England for a few centuries and gave to the English language many French words.
Bouef equals "beef," mouton equals "mutton," and so on.
Still, even this doesn't help as much as you might think.
"Baggage" is French-sounding, and so it is: The French baggage is the English "baggage." "Luggage" is French-sounding, and ... you'll get a blank stare if you try using it: In French, luggage doesn't exist.
Or is it baggage that doesn't exist en Francais, and luggage that does?
Then there are the words that mean sort of like their English cognates, only not quite.
It took me awhile, but on our last night in the country it finally dawned on me why the part of restaurant (in French, restaurant) menus labeled Entrees didn't seem to offer much of substance. In France, entree means the starting or appetizer course, the "entry" into the meal.
Makes sense. So how did "entree" in America come to mean the main course?
The semi-official purpose of the trip (as if visiting France weren't an end in itself) was occasional low-key instruction in art history, another subject I seem to have missed during my years of formal education.
Thus we gazed upon Normandy's rural landscapes, their haystacks looking for all the world like the haystacks painted by the 19th-century Impressionists rebelling against the formality of the art establishment of their day. But to ponder the subject matter, the professor said, is to miss the Impressionists' point: "It's not the haystacks, it's the light."
The Impressionists, eventually winning that point, thereupon became the establishment against whose strictures the post-Impressionists felt compelled to rebel. The post-Impressionists, eventually winning their point, thereupon became ... well, you get the idea.
We latter-day Americans soon found our own sorry selves in reaction. As we picnicked one sunny day on the gustatory delights so readily available in the French countryside, on the red wine from the gas station and the fresh baguettes of crusty bread and the runny Camembert cheese, the proposition was agreed to by acclamation: No, it's not the light, it's the pate.
This business whereby today's young Turks become tomorrow's old fogies is nothing new. Nearly a millenium ago, Carolingian architecture gave way to the Romanesque, which subsequently gave way to the Gothic, and so on.
Sometimes, one tradition is wedded to another. The western half of the abbey church atop Le Mont St. Michel, a fairyland of a quasi-island in the English Channel near where Normandy ends and Brittany begins, is authentically Romanesque. The church's eastern half is authentically Gothic. The marriage works.
Nor is the action-reaction phenomenon limited to art and architecture.
Politics, too, seems to run in cycles. In democracies, control of governments swings like a pendulum from one party to another. More fundamentally, war turns to peace back to war, chaos to order back to chaos.
Can the result of this dynamic, in art or in politics, justifiably be called progress? Or is it mere wheel-spinning? Hard to say.
And are some works of art beautiful and others ugly, or are they all simply points along the way? Are some political phenomena good and others evil, or are they all simply the way things worked out in the march of history?
That, after France, is easier to answer. Regardless of its place in the history of architecture, the Chartres cathedral is beautiful. Regardless of where the Impressionists stand in art history, Monet painted beautifully.
In the summer of '94, you can't visit Normandy without seeing reminders of D-Day and the liberation of France 50 years earlier. And reminders that Nazism and its kindred totalitarianisms, whatever their place in the history of mankind's socio-political organization, are evil.
The old German bunkers dotting the shoreline are ugly reminders of evil. Omaha Beach and the American cemetery on the cliff above are beautiful spots - and a reminder of evil's cost.
It doesn't take a single word, of French or English, to figure that much out.
by CNB