Without Lifting A Finger

I also include here a few photos I took the morning we left Vernon (i.e., the day after the bike ride). That morning I walked over the bridge on the Seine and shot a few more pics, covering some of the same ground we had on the bike ride to Giverny. The only major differences were: I had no bike and it was raining. Anyway . . .                                                                                         

To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself  to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility.

Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin ( Russian : Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин ; 9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian zoologist , evolutionary theorist , philosopher , scientist , revolutionary , philologist , economist , activist , geographer , writer , and prominent anarcho-communist . Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations between workers. He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops , and his principal scientific offering, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution . He also contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition . [ 3 ] [From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin ]

Felice Bauer (18 November 1887 – 15 October 1960) was a fiancée of Franz Kafka , whose letters to her were published as Letters to Felice .   Early Life Felice Bauer was born in Neustadt in Upper Silesia (today Prudnik ), into a Jewish family. Her father Carl Bauer (c. 1850–1914) was an insurance agent, her mother Anna, née Danziger (1849–1930) was the daughter of a local dyer. Felice had four siblings: Else (1883–1952), Ferdinand (called Ferri, 1884–1952), Erna (1885–1978) and Antonie (called Toni, 1892–1918). In 1899 the family moved to Berlin . [1] Felice began attending a Handelsschule , a vocational school for commerce, but had to give it up in 1908 because her family could not afford it. From 1909 on, she worked as a stenographer at the Berlin record company Odeon . [1] One year later, she moved to the Carl Lindström Company , a manufacturer of gramophones and "Parlographs", then the most advanced dictation machines. [1] [2] After a short while she was...

     21 August. Today I got Kierkegaard's  Buch des Richters . As I suspected, his case, despite essential differences, is very similar to mine, at least he is on the same side of the world. *** This excerpt follows on a letter drafted to the father of Felice Bauer (explaining why Kafka shouldn't marry: "A marriage could  not change me, just as my job cannot change me"): 30 August. Where am I to find salvation? How many untruths I no longer even knew about will be brought to the surface. If they are going to pervade our marriage as they pervaded the good-bye, then I have certainly done the right thing. In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure. *** In despair. Today, in the half-asleep during the afternoon: In the end the pain will really burst my head. And at the temples. What I saw when I pictured this to myself was really a gunshot wound, but around the hole the jagged edges...

Le Soleil d'Or , a photo by minim on Flickr. Found this on Flickr. A better photo of the Le Soleil d'Or plaque (mentioning Balzac) that's behind the front desk.

I suppose the Hotel Normandy deserves its own page. We slept there, and Balzac slept there (back then it went by Le Soleil d'Or). If I heard the manager correctly the hotel is also mentioned in a story by Balzac, but I've not yet tracked that down. Anyway, beautiful, old hotel.