Voyage à Paris

We've been hoping and dreaming and planning for this for so long that it's hard to believe that it's about to happen. Tomorrow Evelyn and I are flying to Paris! I'm on sabbatical for the semester from my job at BYU-Idaho, and we are going to spend two months in France. When Kevin Call, the chair of the Music Department, asked me what I was going to do over there, I told him that I was going to take long walks. It reminds me of Mr. Bean in his first movie: a California museum hired a man they thought was a British art historian but who was really a security guard. When they asked him what he did at the museum in England, he said "I sit and look at the paintings." That's what I'm going to do.

I'm exaggerating a little. I'm also writing an online course in the Humanities that I call "Beauty and Creativity." BYU-Idaho has a large and growing online campus with students from all over the world, and this course will be required for all of them. I have written a text and have put together quizzes, discussion boards, and activities, but it needs something else to bring it to life. So Evelyn and I will be making little movies as introductions to each chapter. You can see some of the first drafts of these on my YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/knecht2491). They will evolve as we shoot and add the actual footage. The idea is to create a sense of place with each of the artworks we study in class, as well as attempt to add a personal touch to a classroom of students that I will never meet.

I've also outlined a new writing project, a series of books about how time, place, ideas, and individual personalities come together to create extraordinary bursts of creativity that result in works of uncommon beauty. The first of these will be about Paris in the Middle Ages, about Abelard and Suger and the Scholastics, the Theology of Light, and the building of the great Gothic cathedrals in the Île de France.

So I'll manage to keep busy. We have a nice apartment in a marvelous location, on the Left Bank between the Seine and the Boulevard St. Germain, a ten-minute walk from everywhere (check it out on the Airbnb site, https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/802114). We are going to get annual passes to the Louvre and the Orsay so we can go anytime we want. (My dream is to find a time when I can be alone with the Mona Lisa, if only for a second or two. I'll let you know how that works out!) We have up-close tickets to see Aïda at the Opéra, the first production of the show the company has mounted for over fifty years, for the 200th anniversary of Verdi's birthday. And we've scheduled a few side trips, to Provence and the Languedoc, to Normandy and the north of France, and through England on our way home.

I realize of course that this is unusual. I'm exceptionally blessed. BYUI is not only allowing me to do it, they're paying me to do it. Evelyn could have insisted that we put the money into remodeling our bathrooms (they need it). But thirty years from now, as we nod off in the Rexburg Nursing Center, we won't be thinking about what nice bathrooms we had. This trip is our Big Adventure, the Navel of our Mortal Sojourn, our Hajj. It is our Pilgrimage to Beauty. I'm writing this blog to establish accountability, to make sure that I track each experience as it goes by and give it suitable contemplation. It is also my way of sharing with you, my friends, our Vie en Rose.