Navel Gazing At The Sunrise
Friday, January 7, 2011
La rentrée – the French term for coming back after the month-long summer break seems so apt for the return to “real life” after the temporary detours of holidays, Christmas, weddings, festivities, visitors and complete utter madness. A new beginning, combined with a vague reluctance to leave a parallel world...
It suggests a simultaneous ease and discomfort that seems to perfectly capture the feeling of having been away forever but no time having passed, of things familiar that don’t seem quite the same as before. And that our existence is one long sequence of comings and goings, the waitings-to-go and the almost-coming-back, befores and afters and durings, so that both being there and not there become just as real as each other, and that perhaps you need to have one to fully appreciate the other. Perhaps.
I came across la rentrée before going on my honeymoon last year (well, I did say it was circular) but, unlike a lot of posts that I scheduled for while away, wanted to turn this idea over and give it a good hard think (so it seems appropriate to share at the end of the week when lots of people have returned to work after the Christmas break). It’s easy to predict the Splat? that happens immediately after returning (or, in my case, with astonishing precision three days later – happens every time), what’s harder to anticipate is what is left after that passes. La reentree seems to be all about a delicate ambiguity; the having-had and the having-to-finish, a little like sunrises and sunsets. Different to each other, and with infinite individual variations as well.
All of which seems very thoughtful and vague, and a small interlude between baking and foolishness, like a dormouse stuffed into a teapot. Which makes me wonder – if you navel gaze at the sunrise... is that when you have an orange-coloured sky?
This could be a more accessible (and tastier) than oranges in the sky...
