Back Home, and Chateaubriand

It’s good to be back home! I am once again doing all-day PJs even though you know I hate that. Increasingly I find travel of all kinds to be intensely exhausting, like on a moral level. I return home and spend 7 hours drinking coffee and looking at comics on the internet. I just want to inhabit my space quietly once more, and eat the pot pie my gentleman is currently slow-cooking.

It is stormy outside, the sky’s all astorm and the trees are billowing. The dog has no desire to set paw outside.

Speaking of dog, did he do well at boarding school while we were at my family reunion, you ask? No, he did not. What is it with this guy? We returned to find him famished and filthy, having only eaten half his food (!! I can not imagine him refusing food, but apparently this is what he did the whole time we were gone), having not even touched his peanut butter-filled kong. Unimaginable, these things I am telling you. He also destroyed his bed, which was expected, but is no less distressing. We gave him a bath at the professional bath station right there at the boarding school, and he hated it, and, when released, he leaped out and immediately did the most spectacular face plant. Then he came home and slept for 19 hours, like a dead dog.

I wish he could just understand. Just chill out, snoopy! This is the fanciest place we could find! You get to play all day long with other snoopys, and then at night just chew your kong and go to sleep, and we’ll be back to get you so soon! You dumb dingus!

So, there’s that. I also have a lip sore. Old nemesis returning to my life, or just the result of being in the burning, searing, high-altitude sun for 3 days? File under: Me No Know

Just posted some new advice over at Advice. Diet and lifestyle changes: not as easy as the magazines make it look!

I am almost finished with Chateaubriand’s memoirs. They are astounding. At times you feel like “my god, it’s like he’s known me all my life,” and at other times you feel like “who is this creepy alien?” Like he goes 200 pages without even mentioning that he has a wife, and then when he does bring her up he literally never tells us her name, and basically just says “my wife is a good person, too bad for her she married me.” Then the next chapter is all about how he left his wife for 8 years to go live in exile in England where he finally fell in love for the first time with some girl who lived where he was staying.

But seriously, Chateaubriand had what you’d call a mind-blower of a life. Not many people can lay claim to such things with such casualness as he does. Oh no big deal, he just hung out with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, then sailed across the ocean, met George Washington, lived with the Iroquois for awhile, sailed back, was shipwrecked, joined the emigrant army after the Revolution, went into exile, heard about his entire family being guillotined because of his emigration, wrote essays about the French government and the Christian religion that became world famous, then went back to France, met Napoleon, orchestrated the Bourbon restoration, no biggie, etc. etc. Meanwhile his wife is at home afraid for her life and basically not hearing from him for decades at a time.

He was 5’4″ and “marked by the pox.” He talks about all this crazy stuff he’s done, then he says things like “Alas, would that I had been strangled in my crib as an infant!” He’s so emo, total ultimate Romantic Hero. He meets Napoleon and Napoleon is like “ah yes, Chateaubriand, you will be my ambassador to Rome or something,” then he gets to Rome and immediately resigns, and writes that in spite of his admiration for Napoleon he would not hesitate to shoot him dead. He describes his poverty-stricken childhood in this 600 year old crumbling castle where the last remnants of his line live, barely able to feed themselves. Twelve people live in a castle that could easily have housed 200, and they don’t even have enough money to buy him an officership in the army–he has to enlist as a lowly infantryman. He’s so afraid of women that he rides all the way from Brittany to Paris in a carriage with an older married woman without speaking a single word to her, until she starts thinking he is a “simpleton.” Baby Chateaubriand’s bedroom was all alone up a winding staircase at the top of a turret, and he describes spending hours staring out his window at the blustery fields, having intense sexual fantasies.

When he finds out his family–brother, sisters, sister-in-law, and mother–have all been thrown in prison due to his fleeing France, he’s like “Alas!” and then kind of never talks about it again. It took me forever to realize he was saying his brother and sister-in-law had been guillotined. He devotes 10 times as much space to describing the pangs of his love for this girl and how he can’t marry her because of his stupid wife.

His description of meeting George Washington is so wonderful. This is 10 years after the American Revolution, and Chateaubriand is a young man of lets say 20. He goes and gives his letter of introduction to the General, and then gets to have dinner with him. He tells Washington about his plan to discover the Northwest Passage, and says that Washington was sort of baffled. Washington goes, “but isn’t that quite difficult?” and Chateaubriand goes “But not so difficult as founding a nation, as you have done!” and Washington offers him his hand and says “Well, well, young man!” Then Chateaubriand is like “I never laid eyes on him again.”

He ends almost every section by pointing out that memories die along with people, and that nobody remembers anybody once the last person who remembers them is dead. He’ll describe some amazing summer spent with his aunt and cousins and then he suddenly says “I am perhaps the last living soul who even knows these people existed; when I am dead it will be as though they never lived.” Oh lay off, Chateaubriand! I love this guy!

He hears Robespierre speak at the National Assembly. He’s buddies with Louis XVIII. He singlehandedly revives Christianity in France. I’ve just gotten to the Hundred Days, I can’t wait to read what he says about all that. The way he talks about Napoleon is fascinating. He loathes him, but reveres him. He admires his chutzpah and his genius, basically, while being disgusted by his morals and his tyranny. Pretty common view, actually, among Europeans at that time. Napoleon gets so mad at him but somehow never has him killed. Very exciting! And the whole time he’s so, so depressed.

Ok bye

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One Response to Back Home, and Chateaubriand

  1. Zot says:

    Ummm, pot pie! I need to get me one of those gentlemen for my kitchen.

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