Oh, yes! Please, nothing but muted pleasures and gazing and daydreaming for me. I am tired from the past decade’s relentless onslaught of imagery and sound and the endless need for me to act on or respond to something.

Muted pleasures. I love that, Claire. Sitting by the harbour with my dog while we watch the ducks is my muted pleasure.

Back when I was travelling, my French was good enough to spend a month in Tahiti without speaking English but it’s all gone now. I can just about make sense of written French but French people speak too fast for me to follow. I needed the translations too. I loved the last one.

I loved my travelling days but I’d be afraid to go back now for fear of how much everything will have changed. How much I have changed.

I stay drug-free now because, after drug-induced escape, there is always return to all the demands of reality, like a bad landing ending a delightful hot-air ballon ride. Better to sit on the patio with unfocused gaze. Muted pleasures come with age.

My two years of high school French lessons were enough to allow me to ace a college paper on Arthurian literature by impressively including several quotations IN FRENCH in proper context–but not enough to understand the Baudelaire piece you included. So I looked up the translations and appreciated seeing several on one page, each creating at least a slightly different interpretation from the rest. Who can know which one Charles would like best 170 years after he wrote the poem? None sounds as lovely read aloud in English as the original does in French.

I’m glad your memories of your travels in Asia bring you pleasure. And that literature provides an easy bridge for getting at least halfway there.