The Feel of France

Dear fellow inventors,

I have not posted in sometime because I have been on vacation in France, visiting Paris, Burgundy, and Nimes.

Elliot and I are continuing to work on the solar oven.  I purchased a very powerful polisher, which should allow us to achieve a highly reflective surface to complete our current solar over design in the next few weekends.

In the meantime, for those of you who may care, here is a little essay, a "trip report" if you will, about France.

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The Feel of France

France is full French persons. More than the gently rolling hills, the palaces once used by kings and now used by tourists, the towns grown organically around old walled cities, the remaining forests, the sheepfolds and white Charolais cattle glowing in the sun, the 150-year-old stone barns, it is the French who make France beautiful.

The French are beautiful because they pay attention. They eat with enthusiasm and savor, and so they do not eat too much. They have elected a 35-hour work week, and so they have more time to pay attention to their lives. The women select their clothes, even simple t-shirts, carefully. Fathers pay attention to their kids in public. Sales people pay attention to their clients. They all pay attention to tourists.

The food is not cooked better than the food in my city of Austin, Texas. I don't believe the French chefs are on the whole smarter or harder-working than ours are. However, eating is better in France. In the first place it seems clear that food production is less factory-oriented than in America, based on the herds and flocks you see in the fields as you drive along, evidently eating the summer grass, and the great bales of hay drying for winter. The signs directing to you “country tomatoes” at low prices seem to be in direct competition with the markets that sell the same, evidently local, produce. That these markets are a far more important part of most peoples lives is of course aided by the fact that their towns are based on walking and not driving, and of course it is more efficient to have a market stand when thousands of people walk by each morning and nobody has to worry about parking.

Perhaps more importantly, the French pay attention to meals. The meals are better, even if the individual food items are the same. The French give you just the right amount of food. The menu design of several small courses encourages a leisurely enjoyment of a variety of foods. You don't just “have a steak”, you have an apéritif, an entrée , a steak, a glass of wine, and a desert. In short, you have an experience. The steak is half the size of what we Texans consider a serving, but it taste twice as good and weighs have as much in the belly. It is “just right” more often in France.

Someone decided to plant that line of sycamores along that roadside 80 years ago, or decided to place the road along them already, and they were paying attention when they did so. Someone decided to plant geraniums next to that rose. If France seems a little less manicured than England, it seems a little less overwrought and a little more just right.

Americans sometimes think of the French as rude and lazy, which seem patently absurd. Of course, I prepared for my visit by not being rude and lazy myself—I learned enough French to say that I don't speak French well, I learned how to great people, understand numbers, and say please and thank you. I always asked if people spoke English before throwing it at them. Usually their English was better than my French, but we always met on equal terms, both struggling to communicate in a foreign language. Of the hundred or so people I interacted with, everyone single one of them was as helpful as they could be, with the exception of the two gentlemen who attempted to pickpocket my iPhone on the Metro, and they had the courtesy not to strike or stab me.

The idea that French are lazy must come from the 35-hour work week. I think is is better to say the French have elected not to work at making money as much as Americans have elected to do so. This is a cultural choice. The French seem to believe what we say: “Their is more to life than making money.”

It is impossible to be lazy and ride bikes as much as the French do. I am not widely traveled, I'm sure there are places where bikes are used even more, but France is a very bike-friendly place. Even in Paris, there are people riding to work, and they seem to be treated with kindness and respect by the automobilists. In America we treat biking as an activity distinct from transportation, whereas the French seem to a see a continuum of cycling, from cars diverting carefully around an old gentleman barely rolling along to the Tour de France. A woman riding her bike to work in a long skirt is not as colorful or flashy as a rider in a bright racing jersey zipping by, but caresses the eye rather than striking it.

The Eiffel Tower is beautiful because of the attention paid to detail in its design. Its beauty derives from its just-right proportions, its just-right level of complexity, its harmonic balance of the bold and the delicate. Fontainebleau is beautiful because of its harmony, where as the Louvre is excessive—but then, just as we did, they got rid of the source of excess, didn't they?

America got lucky after World War II. The action has been in America since that time, though the USA seems to be less dominant now. I believe we and the French have a great deal in common intellectually. Certainly, we have embraced the French invention of parkour as enthusiastically as the French have embraced Hollywood and rock n' roll. In science, art, literature, and above all philosophy, we and French are really kindred spirits. We should try to give the French some of our brash, loud energy and take from them some of their balance and harmony.

I left France inspired to live a little more harmoniously, to try to make things a little more beautifully, to concentrate a little more on fewer things, and to return.