19 oct

Work goes on. Well work…. I have to review books, so I will somehow have to read them. Which is no punishment. Today the postman delivered two books: One from Alan Greenspan, the other about Bach. I want to write a music review for Christmas. I love to receive these books here, addressed to Joost van Mierlo, Camping Saint Point, France.

Am reading a book about Chopin, in fact. From Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. About the year he spent to learn the 1^st Ballade. Tremendously fun and inspiring. Am also rereading Sarah Bakewell’s ‘How to live’, about Montaigne. I say rereading but I never finished it in the first place. And am also rereading ‘Books as agents of Change’, selfpublished by my uncle Mari Pijnenborg. All three the most stimulating books I have read in ages. Mari’s book needs to be published for everybody’s use. He wrote about 48 books that changed history. Telling a little bit about the author, a little about the book itself and then about its implications for the current time. I realized yesterday that he didn’t write about the implications of The Gospels, he still owes us an explanation for that.

‘How to Live’ is a variation on the theme of finding relevance in old writings for everyday life. Bakewell takes this question, How to live?, and provides twenty answers based on Montaigne’s Essais. (Mari calls his way of dealing with the 48 works also essais, after Montaigne I suppose and after the French word essaier, which is: trying out) All titillating stuff. I downloaded the essais of Montaigne on my Kindle and will be reading those shortly. Am just about to read chapter 3, for which the answer is: Be born. Sounds rather obvious and is, I remember, an excuse to tell a little bit about Montaigne’s life.

The sun was out this morning so I decided to retry my walk. I think I figured out where I went wrong a few days ago and really ended up this time at the lovely Romanesq church of Saint Point. I even walked part of a Grande Resonnee, number 76, which according to my friend Han are well marked footpaths. Well, not this one, but then again, the church steeple was a signpost by itself.

Most of the walk was over paved roads. In the about two hours it took me, I didn’t come across any car, which is amazing. The other thing that is amazing is that these roads are better paved than the M25, or the I80, but not as good as the A12. It Is good to realize that the Dutch are superior in some things.

And what about churches? No new ones today, fourteen yesterday (of which one was converted to a village hall, with stripping out everything authentic!, quite shocking). Saw also two other churches on Wednesday, which makes that we have seen almost one hundred Romanesq churches up to now, all nicely catalogued in iPhoto. Each church as a separate album, which makes insanity look quite orderly. Which is one of the ways to contain it, I suppose.