Snow Falling on Pain au Chocolat

After almost two weeks of silence, the blog surfaces again. I had to pour my writing energies into a review essay, and was working on some poems - c'est la vie, as very few people here in Paris actually say. The best thing I've recently eaten was a pain au chocolat under very specific meteorological conditions: a suddent snowfall during my commute to the bibliotheque nationale. frankly, croissants are a bit of a crap shoot even in Paris: you have to know a good patisserie, first of all, and second of all you have to get them right after the croissants have come out of the oven - a few hours later, and the peak experience that makes pastry here subtly but completely different from pastry in America, is lost. I got lucky last monday and bought my pain au chocolat from my usual bakery, and bit into it as I walked out towards the underpass and through the snow, feeling little bits of it (the snow, not the pastry) on my face and neck and hands, vision slightly obscured by snowfall, and _felt_ the counterpoint between the cold weather and the hot, buttery pastry and the melted chocolate inside it. It was like being reminded, in an age in which "beautiful" images are on billboards all around us, that beautiful things are from an entirely different order of being. It rocked my world. I worked for six hours straight and then came home and collapsed. It was a good day.

Ben