Imaginary Conversations and Random Thoughts

Alvaro Vargas Llosa has written an interesting article about what changes may await France and its new president, and whether or not France is ready for those changes. You'll find the article, "Has France Bottomed Out? Probably Not" at TCS Daily.

Llosa does us the good deed of quoting Matthew Parris article from the Times of London. I shall do you the good deed of doing the same:

I don't sniff in the wind in la France profonde (though I begin to in urban Paris) that palpable sense of having reached the end of a road," Parris wrote. "The changes France needs to embrace will be convulsive. The pain will be intense. ... We British found that when Thatcherism arrived. But even at the low point of Thatcher's first term ... you almost never heard anyone suggest a return to what had gone before. There was a sense, in 1979, that we had burnt a bridge behind us, and had wanted to.

The emphasis is mine, because, wow, that's a sentence! To heck with literature. You don't need Twain or Faulkner to find a work of art in a string of words, although you certainly could. And just because it's an article in the paper doesn't mean it has to be straightforward and bland. Parris has a real gem here; it's a Picasso of a sentence.

Like most art, it may not be possible to explain exactly how or why it moves you; it's enough to know that it does. If you're not a word geek of some sort like me, this whole post may be meaningless to you. But if there is a single person out there who has any idea what I'm talking about, this one's for you.