J and I had spent Saturday evening preparing the house for Sunday visitors. A cake had been baked and iced; plates, cutlery and napkins had been deployed; a fire had been laid in the fireplace and sat awaiting the invocation of a match — for spring here is still taking its own sweet time to ripen, with the first magnolia blossoms opening to an April which is still more lion-like than lamb.

J had chosen a morning swim as her reward for completing our advance preparations; my reward was to roll over and consider the bookshelf close at hand — from which I eventually selected the revised edition of The Letters of E. B. White.

I love to dip into a volume of collected letters, hoping to find one written on the same calendar day. I consider this a gentle form of bibliomancy, and the selected letter often resonates with the day to come. What, then, might my day have in common with that described by E. B. White in his letter dated the 6th of April, 1952?

Writing to James Thurber from his office at The New Yorker, White gives Thurber advice on what to do when attending the birth of a lamb (apparently one chops off the lamb’s tail with an ax) and shares news of a party which the Whites had given in honor of William Shawn’s being named editor of The New Yorker.

132 people! With “dancing of a sort” and a “contrapuntal literary and emotional atmosphere, […] the kind of goings on that made you feel that the door would presently open and in would walk Scott and Zelda.” J and I had planned a more modest gathering for our own Sunday afternoon, but maybe with the right kind of music a “contrapuntal literary and emotional atmosphere” was still within reach.

White’s letter closes with a lovely run of sentences which helped align his North Brooklin, Maine of 1952 with my own stormy Deep Cove day in 2008:

Spring is making litle sashays about coming to town, but it has been a fairly unconvincing demonstration so far. It’s what Maine people call “crow weather.” I still think Maine speech is about the most satisfactory.

“Crow weather” — a most satisfactory Maine term indeed; well suited for this stormy Deep Cove day with friends just beginning, which will end with us all sharing a Reine de Saba cake before a crackling fire.

1. none of the above
2. We’d worn out the nib of our Montblanc Marcel Proust fountain pen
3. Our accountant had assured us that the $719.56 in our RRSP would allow us to quit our day job and retire to the south of France
4. We were determined to set a new record for Sloth
5. No one told us that the writers’ strike had ended
6. Someone had to read all the stuff that the other bloggers have been writing
7. That “life” thing kept interfering; persistant and very annoying

I must confess that I suffer from a form of identity confusion when writing (sporadically! but we’ll get to that later) entries for this blog. Am I the collective noun referred to in these pages as “the t&p editorial collective”? Or am I a single member of that same august group? (because there are times when it is a royal pain to maintain the royal “we”). Or am I an anonymous flesh and blood figure lurking behind the scene, with a keen (and perhaps obsessive) interest in books and all aspects of the bookish world?

Confused or not, all of my identities agree that it is important to draw attention to the recently announced BC Book Prizes short lists for 2008. For weeks the teams of judges have been pouring over the — 300-plus! — submitted books to find the ones which they feel represent the best of this past year’s crop. An unenviable job, but the results are in, and you can review the shortlisted titles on the brand-spanking-new BC Book Prizes website.

The shortlist announcement got a bit of press — the Vancouver Sun and the Georgia Straight — which I’m pleased about. And I hope to see more coverage when the awards themselves are presented at the annual Gala dinner (April 26 in Vancouver).

The new BC Book Prizes website is great by the way, thanks to the efforts of Monique Trottier and Work Industries (check out Monique’s blog at www.somisguided.com). In addition to the Book Prize shortlists you’ll find detailed information on BC Book Prizes on Tour, and on the annual BC Book Prizes Soirée event, which will take place Saturday, April 19 this year, between 7 and 9 pm at the Metropolitan Hotel. The Soirée is an excellent opportunity to mingle with some of the nominated authors; there will be music, as well as food by Diva at the Met. And it’s free!

To close this long-overdue entry I want to take a moment and indulge my own enthusiasms (because what else is a web log for if not self-indulgence?) by drawing your attention (upper left) to one of the five titles shortlisted for this year’s Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize: Theresa Kishkan’s Phantom Limb.

This is a lovely collection of personal essays, many of them rooted in BC’s Sechelt Peninsula, as Kishkan reads the stories that reside in her local landscape. My dear friend A has reviewed Phantom Limb on her own blog (to which I now direct you). There is a richness of feeling in Kishkan’s writing, a blend of clear-eyed observation and reflection which makes this book a pleasure, and a worthy companion to Red Laredo Boots, the essay collection which first brought this fine writer — poet, novelist, and essayist — to my attention.

So what are you waiting for? Buy it! Read!

“I had a ticket that I’d bought at a Vélib stand, which wasn’t working,” said Sylvia Whitman, manager of a bookstore in the Latin Quarter. “When I found a stand that was working, there was a queue of people waiting to buy their ticket, but no queue for those who already had one. Yet when I went to get a bike everyone started shouting at me, yelling that they’d been waiting for an hour. What are you supposed to do?”

— from a November 22 story on the Paris transit strike in the International Herald Tribune

J and I spent three days in Paris at the end of our summer trip to France, and tried out a pair of Vélib bikes for fun. They’re clunky things, but perfectly suited for trundling around Paris; and you can’t beat the price: for transients such as ourselves there’s a 1 € registration fee for a single day’s subscription. The first 30 minutes of any rental period are free; an hour’s ride will cost you a measly euro: peanuts! The majority of the bike stands (which hold a dozen bicycles or so) are located near the standard tourist draws: the Eiffel Tower; Notre Dame; the Place des Vosges etc. Rental instructions are straight-forward, and are available in several languages on the Vélib kiosk’s display screen. When you’ve finished your ride, you need to find an open slot at one of the stands, and your rental period ends as soon as you’ve clicked your bicycle back into place.

The problem, of course, is what to do if you can’t find an open slot, and when we were there there were rumors of perpetually empty Vélib stands — the ones atop Montmartre, for example — and others — those at the foot of Montmartre — perpetually full. The Vélib system allegedly makes allowances for this kind of usage pattern, with trailers of Vélib bicycles being towed from “have” to “have not” stations behind the scenes. But the usage pattern for summer tourism is quite different from the needs of Parisian commuters, which leads (predictably) to the kinds of confrontations reported on above.

J and I picked our Vélib bikes from a stand on the Rue André Mazet, a quiet side-street where we could get a feel for the clunkers before we braved the Latin Quarter crowds. We managed to execute a few trial runs without flattening any pedestrians, wheeling in a series of slow, tight ovals between the curbs, and then set out tentatively along the Rue Saint-André des Arts, crossing the busy Boul Mich and Rue Saint-Jacques towards our hotel in the Marais—with a brief, reverential pause before Shakespeare and Company, the “bookstore in the Latin Quarter” referred to by the Herald Tribune.

At one time—during those distant Shakespeare and Company days—I considered myself part of an exclusive set: a tumbleweed! practically a Paris resident!; tourists were “the other”, and I one of the fortunate few allowed to sit behind the shop counter, looking past them through the open doorway—my open doorway—across the Seine to Notre Dame. George Whitman will be 94 years old this December; his cycle-commuting daughter Sylvia is now at the bookstore’s helm, and my infrequent visits to the shop have a distinctly nostalgic air.

I noticed, during this most recent trip to France, that a change seems to have come over me; I appear to have crossed an invisible threshold to another stage in life: I no longer deliberately avoid the standard “Paris tourist” activities as in days gone by.

I spent quite some time on one of our September afternoons, browsing at the bouquiniste stalls along the Quai François Mitterand, with the Eiffel Tower silhouetted against the skyline just downstream. It was not the books which drew me (although I did leaf through the antique postcards, translating fading messages with a voyeur’s eye); my main purpose was to examine the miniature models of the Eiffel Tower, offered in a wide range of sizes, materials and styles. These things, more than any other object, have for me always symbolized the cattle-like crowds of Paris tourists; I had avoided them—both tourists and Eiffel models—like the plague. This time, though, I found myself looking on the Eiffel miniatures quite fondly: was this an admission of defeat? capitulation? Or was it merely a new-found equanimity? I still don’t know…

One of those who caught my ear at the 2007 Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival was Irish author Claire Keegan. Claire read at several Festival events including Grand Openings on October 17th. It was mesmerizing. She has a wonderful reading voice, but it was the prose itself which stood out: lovely language free of cliché and not a ounce of excess in her sentences, the story advanced with a confidence and skill that is all too rare. She read the opening section from “The Forester’s Daughter,” one of seven stories in Walk The Blue Fields, her second collection of short fiction. I bought the book and had her sign it after the reading; I can recommend it highly.

Here’s one excerpt from “The Forester’s Daughter” to illustrate. Martha has bought some roses from a salesman, “a big blade of a man with a thick moustache,” who’d stopped by the farmhouse while her husband Deegan was away. When Deegan learns what she’s spent his money on, he rages, calling her a fool. Watch how Keegan, in just over a paragraph, sweeps the narrative forward without a single false note, taking the reader with her:

That summer her roses bloomed scarlet but long before the wind could blow their heads asunder, Martha realised she had made a mistake. All she had was a husband who hardly spoke now that he’d married her, an empty house and no income of her own. She had married a man she did not love. What had she expected? She had expected it would grow and deepen into love. And now she craved intimacy and the type of conversation that would surpass misunderstanding. She thought of finding a job but it was too late: a child was near ready for the cradle.

The children Martha bore she reared casually, never threatening them with anything sharper than a wooden spoon. When her first-born was placed in her arms her laughter was like a pheasant rising out of the bushes. The boy, a shrill young fellow, grew tall but it soon became apparent that he had no grá for farming; […]

How wonderfully confident it feels! The roses blooming and blown asunder in a single sentence and there we have the summer summarized. At the end of the paragraph and the summer a child is anticipated, and two words into the subsequent paragraph the child is children; another pair of sentences and each child is distinct, with different genders and individual characteristics and then they are grown themselves.

The story is a compact marvel, and there are others in the collection that feel just as assured. The book is not without a few missteps: later in “The Forester’s Daughter” we are abruptly inside the thoughts of a dog who has been adopted by the family: it jars to have this sudden shift of point of view. But by and large these stories are among the best I’ve read in ages. A writer to watch—and read—with pleasure.

Remembrance Day
Sunday, November 11, 2007, 1 to 4 pm
Listel Hotel, 1300 Robson Street, Vancouver

“What is a Memory Festival?” we hear you ask. It’s “an ongoing inquiry into public and private memory” (to quote from the Memory Festival’s website). And rather than repeat and rephrase information which is already online we simply direct interested parties there (www.geist.com/memoryfestival) for a better answer.

But why not drop by the Listel Hotel at some point on Remembrance Day afternoon where you can find out more, and share your own ideas about memory and the Memory Festival. Admission is free, and you’ll have an opportunity to contribute to salubrious conversations about memory, while pondering a rich selection of readings, slide shows, photo & quilt exhibits. See you there; tell ‘em the t&p editorial collective sent you…

J and I just back from an evening in the lower reaches of the CBC bunker down on Cambie Street, where we posed as “Members of Our Studio Audience” during a taping of the Studio One Book Club, with Alberto Manguel—who describes himself as “a Canadian writer, born in Argentina and living in France”—as the featured guest of hosts Sheryl MacKay and John Burns (Books editor of The Georgia Straight). Those who missed the taping will have a second chance when the evening’s conversations and discussion are broadcast by North by Northwest on CBC Radio One 690, on Saturday, October 27th between 8 and 9 am.

Manguel is a strikingly erudite polymath who seems able, in support of his answer to a question from the audience, to instantly extract a perfectly apropos passage from any one of the many books that he has read, no matter how long ago the reading, no matter how obscure the book. It is an impressive feat to witness Manguel construct his carefully considered responses (and he is the only one I can think of who, while apparently speaking off the cuff, speaks not simply in well-formed sentences, but in polished paragraphs, with every punctuation mark in place). He speaks deliberately—and I think this point is key—giving the listener’s ear sufficient time to gather up the idea being expressed without the loss of a single clause. It is as if a spinner and skein-winder were in perfect synchrony, and it is deeply satisfying for listeners, particularly in an era when conversations are more often characterized by people talking over each other and interrupting; as if each participant in such a “conversation” had lost all hope of being listened to attentively and is now determined to at least have his say at any cost (the volume of his voice leap-frogging over that of his conversational opponent) whether he be heard or not.

Manguel gave two readings during the CBC taping session, the first an extract from his new book The City of Words (the published version of this year’s series of Massey lectures, which are even now in progress). Manguel later read a section from The Library at Night, which he prefaced by describing the pleasure of finally having sufficient space in the library of his new home in France to have all 35000 of his books on shelves; or almost all of them: there was also an aphoristic comment to the effect that “every library is always too small for the number of books you own.”

The main problem I have with this evening’s event is that, despite the name—the Studio One Book Club—it bore not the slightest resemblance to any book club gathering that I have ever been a part of. Discussions at our book club are much closer to the “conversations” described above, and I think it grossly unfair of Mssrs MacKay, Burns, and Manguel to have colluded in the fantastic deception which was this evening’s taping; in so doing they have raised unrealistic hopes—of civilized conversations, wide-ranging discussions which connect contemporary issues to a rich and literate past—which I am fairly certain I will never see fulfilled.

Record Stores
Camera film manufacturing
Crop-dusting
Gay bars
Newspapers
Pay phones
Used bookstores
Piggy banks
Telemarketing
Coin-operated arcades

“What on earth,” I hear you ask, “do crop-dusters have in common with telemarketers? Or pay phones with piggybanks?”¹

Whatever the common thread (we refer our loyal readers to the article itself) it is the presence of used bookstores² on the list that concerns us most. What kind of meagre future do they imagine for us all, devoid of used bookstores? Even Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was not so bleak…

There was a time when I pictured myself as the proprietor of a used bookstore; I could not imagine a more suitable career. I know better now; the hours are long, dust gradually invades the lungs, and revenues have been in steep decline (for which the Internet is reportedly to blame).

According to the bookseller quoted in the Sun, the younger generation is equally at fault: 18-to-28-year-olds apparently have better things to do than browse. Several years ago I tried to introduce the pleasures of used bookstores to two eighteen-year olds, the children of a friend. But they mislaid their birthday gift certificates before they could cash them in. What else can a concerned book-lover do (he asks rhetorically) but try singlehandedly to make up for their indifference?

An attitude which leads to: two hours of browsing this afternoon in Sorensen Books on Cook Street near Fort in Victoria, and the wonderful Bubby Rose’s Bakery and Café (croissants! free wireless!) across the street to contemplate my finds: a copy of Theresa Kishkan’s lovely novella Inishbream to send to an Irish friend; and W. M. Spackman’s An Armful of Warm Girl, with a title and a narrative voice that I could not resist.

In my opinion, two books shows an unprecedented restraint. For those of you with doubts, consider the tens of thousands that I left behind.

• • •

¹ One bright young member of our editorial collective points out that “both pay phones and piggybanks have slots where coins might be inserted” — which could also explain the threat to coin-operated arcades: a coinage cataclysm on the near horizon forseen by none but Entrepreneur.com, that renders all metallic money null and void. But surely coin-operated gay bars are few and far between?

² The pedant in me questions this spelling, since it is not the bookstore which is used, but the books contained therein.

Words appearing in the novel without an apostrophe: arent, couldnt, didnt, doesnt, dont, hadnt, hasnt, isnt, oclock, shouldnt, theyre, wasnt, werent, wouldnt, youre, youve. This is intentional by the author. Please dont send letters to the copy editor, Shaun Oakey.

— from the acknowledgements in Michael Winter’s The Architects Are Here

Burt Cummerbund, a spokesperson for Canadians for the Removal of Asinine Punctuation, hailed author Michael Winter for continuing his courageous crusade to liberate the apostrophe in his latest novel, The Architects Are Here.

“It takes a brave man to stand up to the copy-editing Gestapo,” said Cummerbund, sporting one of CRAP’s Free the apostrophe! T-shirts. “And I’m here to testify that Michael Winter is a brave man.”

Cummerbund continued by noting that,

as a British immigrant and a Newfoundlander, Michael identifies with the oppressed in Canadian society. Which is why he has taken on the CRAP cause. Many people fail to realize that punctuation marks have emotions too; but Michael can sense into that. He really feels the pain of all the periods who have been forced to the rear of their sentences—like second-class citizens of the literary world. And Michael understands the anguish of exclamation marks, who are contactually obliged to put on their happy faces—even though their hearts be breaking.

We here at CRAP have adopted the apostrophe as our poster boy; we’re using it to “brand” our campaign against asinine punctuation: the apostrophe will become our “swoosh.” For far too long authors have used the apostrophe divisively, forcing words apart which long to be united. If you press your ear against the cover of a typical Canadian novel you’ll hear the keening of all the sundered Ns and the Ts in words like “can’t” and “don’t”; but press your ear against the cover of The Architects Are Here and you’ll hear these gentle little murmers of contentment, as all those lonely consonants get to know each other once again.

In a two year old blog posting Michael Winter describes the epiphany which caused him to start stripping apostrophes from his manuscripts:

I just decided one day, what’s up with this symbol that tells the reader of a contraction. That two words have been sandwiched and a letter or two left out. Why do I have to remind the reader of this grammatical omission.

Those who wish to support Michael Winter and CRAP in their fight against asanine punctuation are encouraged to send donations directly to t&p. A $5 contribution covers the cost of training out-of-work apostrophes to rewarding new careers as part-time commas; $20 pays for the castration surgery which allows transgendered apostrophes to fully express their inner period.

Umbrellas and gumboots were the order of the day at Sunday’s Word on the Street Book and Magazine Festival. Festival organizers were hit by a double whammy this year: the gloomy weather undoubtedly reduced the number of participants (and who could blame them? Rain and printed matter have never mingled all that well); combine this with Vancouver’s civic strike (now in its 11th week) which prevented Word on the Street from making use of any part of the VPL plaza (striking CUPE members and their supporters used the opportunity to present their side of the labour dispute, with information tables and posters offering the “Word on the Strike”).

It was difficult to resist the urge to rescue all those bargain books and freshly-printed magazines from the elements. My haul this year was relatively modest: the Fall issue (#66) of Geist magazine, fresh off the presses; and another of those wonderful Poetry in Transit bus “cards” to decorate my office.

September has always been a battleground chez J and I, our annual wrestle with the moral quandry: when to turn the furnace on? A question which has come up a time or two before…

The battle is not between the two of us; we are in complete agreement that the longer we can put the fatal moment off, the better it will be. Better in what sense I’m not quite sure, but neither of us seems in any doubt.

It has become a morning ritual: the first one up proceeds—briskly!—through the frosty kitchen towards the thermostat to get the daily reading; the other pulls the covers up around their chin and calls out an estimate. “60 degrees?” was this morning’s guess; thrilled to learn that it was actually a toasty 61.

We light nightly fires in the living room’s brick fireplace and huddle near the flames like moths, clinging to our books and mugs of tea. I have this vision of the pair of us, desperate inside our bungalow, assaulted on all sides by unseen cosmic forces which seek to batter down the door; the Deep Cove version of The Omega Man; or Shaun of the Dead if you prefer.

We urge each other on: thicker socks; another layer of sweaters; two hot water bottles; the down duvet. Just a few more days until we can declare our victory and get another Autumn underway.

I had been attempting to give my undivided attention to D, a friend, who was seated directly across me. D was midway through a convoluted narrative, attempting to describe the precise route taken by a virus which had recently been rampaging through his lymphatic system node by node; I thought of General Sherman’s pitiless and unstoppable march to the sea.

“I picked it up on Monday,” D explained, as he applied a sodden cotton handkerchief to his swollen nose. “The day we last had coffee, in fact.”

He accompanied this remark with a mournful sniff, and a glance in my direction which seemed to suggest that, while he did not exactly accuse, he nonetheless forgave.

“It started here,” he said, indicating the right side of his throat, “and then it moved up into my sinuses.” He placed both index fingers upon his cheekbones.

“Then it moved into my left eye.” He blinked rheumily, and made a gesture in mid-air which I understood to represent the flanking manoeuvre employed by the unnamed virus. “And into my left ear as well.”

He sighed, and dabbed again with his handkerchief, which squelched.

I noticed myself push back gently against the marble tabletop, leaning casually away from him as if I’d simply felt the need to rearrange my limbs. I held my coffee cup between us as a kind of talisman, while simultaneously feigning an intense interest in D’s account. I shook my head sympathetically, and replayed our earlier meeting on the sidewalk.

D had seemed in perfect health just then, and I hadn’t hesitated before asking if he had time for coffee. I wondered how I could missed the signs which now seemed so obvious: the sniffling, the matted hair, the self-pitying expression on D’s face; the mis-matched socks.

“And then it moved down into my lungs,” he continued dolefully, and coughed. For a moment I thought that I could actually detect a jihadi vanguard of the virus, an advance party which rode the air, willing to sacrifice themselves by the teeming millions to advance their cause. I leaned further back, until I felt the coolness of the window glass pressing through my shirt.

“Tell me more,” I muttered between laced fingertips, while looking desperately around me for some socially acceptable escape route. The caffé washroom, perhaps, and an apologetic explanation a few weeks later: an urgent phone call; no opportunity to explain at the time, unfortunately; regrets…

Absorbed in his viral travelogue, D gestured in the air between us with his handkerchief, then leaned abruptly forward to continue. I recoiled, but then embraced my fate; for what else could a true friend do in such circumstances?

“And then,” D added with what seemed a note of pride, “it dropped into my stomach. And I can tell you,” — this said with apparent relish — “what followed afterwards was not a pretty sight…”

• • •

Heidi Julavits imagines a future in which the publishing industry has achieved its “streamlined apotheosis—a single, worldwide, ExxonMobil-owned literary empire offering a list of seven books twice a year”

Suddenly, there will be no new books. Shockingly, this will sadden people and make them yearn for a golden literary era none of them experienced. The actual writers, those few still kicking around, will alight from their surprisingly swank hovels (not writing will have served them well). At first, these writers—mostly buffed, androgynous sorts—will be spotted at farmers’-market stalls, selling clipped sheaves of laser printouts beside the cider-doughnut lady. They will shake your hands, these writers. They will promise that their literary wares are the product of a single, careful mind, unmutated by mass-production and untainted by viral collaboration, and since these writers are plain-looking people, even downright unattractive and badly dressed, they will seem instantly more believable and less evil than the glossy actor-authors of recent memory. Soon a slogan will attach itself to this phenomenon—READ LOCALLY—and the new AgriCultural movement will emerge. Writers will begin to form allegiances with small farmers, and every small farm soon will have its own writer. The farmer and the writer will decide that mutual dependency and market diversification are the keys to survival. When one writer produces a less than stellar product, he will be buttressed by egg sales; when the farmer has a poor strawberry yield, he will be buttressed by the writer’s pure and homey creative output.

Of course the success of this system will lead farms to merge, and writers will begin to work in greater numbers on larger farms, and eventually people from afar will want to read the works of writers whose hands they cannot personally shake, and so the inevitable human impulse to slake all desires and improve efficiency (and thus profit) will mean that by the dawn of the next millennium, we’ll be right back where we are today. But for a few decades ar least—just before the seas rise above the writers’ silos and drown us—oh, what a golden age of literature there will be.

I first encountered the work of Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy about 15 years ago, through the remarkable photographs and text in his 1990 book A Collaboration With Nature. Much of Goldsworthy’s work is ephemeral, created from leaves and grasses, twigs and branches; even ice and snow. The pieces take hours of painstaking work, yet many of them last only minutes or hours. He works in natural settings in various locations around the world; the resulting pieces are then photographed and left to the elements, gradually becoming incorporated into their surroundings. For a number of years Goldsworthy has had an association with the Réserve géologique de Haute-Provence in Digne-les-Bains, creating site-specific pieces for them under the general heading of “Refuges d’Art”. J and I have come to this area in order to search out these pieces; specifically la Sentinelle Tartonne, one of three sculptures Goldsworthy created in stone to mark the main points of entry to the Réserve géologique.

Our instructions (obtained from the Musée-Promenade de la Réserve géologique in Digne) seem straightforward: “From Digne take the N85 towards Castellane and Nice. In the village of Barrême, turn left onto the N202; 2 km later, turn left again and take the D19 toward Tartonne. When in Plan de Chaude take the D219. 2 km after the hamlet of Les Laugiers, the Sentinelle will be on your left under a large pine tree, at a large curve in the road.”

The D19, a narrow, uneven road, takes us uphill into the valley of the Asse de Clumanc, winding and switching back towards the Col du Défend, the pass which will take us from the valley of the Asse into the valley of the Verdon. Eventually we will continue up the Verdon through Colmars, over the Col d’Allos and down to the town of Barcelonnette where we plan to spend a night; or two. The scenery is breathtaking; the light of the late afternoon sun casts deep shadows into the folds and striations of the exposed rock faces of the peaks, and the pine forests which cover the surrounding hillsides take on a darker shade of green. This region — the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence — is a transition from the drier landscape of the Provençal hills, to the harsher landscape of the Alps themselves. In Provence the fields would have been planted in vines, or lavander; here we drive past open-sided barns which have filled to the rafters with cylindrical bales of hay, winter forage for the cows and sheep which are pastured here.

As we near the alpine village of Tartonne the trail to the Sentinelle grows somewhat confused — was that the D219? Did that small sign say Les Laugiers? — but we have seen nothing resembling a Sentinelle, nothing which could be considered “art.” There have been only the bournes which mark distances along these minor roads, and the occasional cluster of stone buildings; so we carry on, although somewhat more slowly than before.

After a further 3 km we begin to give up hope, and when we spot a woman and a boy working in a field, I pull the car onto the shoulder and make my way up the grassy hillside towards them. They have been working on fences, and pause when I approach. My questions are met with puzzled expressions; “la Sentinelle”, “la sculpture d’Andy Goldsworthy” — these words evidently mean nothing to them, and it is only when I bring out my photocopied sheet of directions that the woman understands: “Ah! Vous voulez voir l’oeuf! C’est encore plus loin” — gesturing that we must continue further up the road. But I could see that she didn’t quite believe that this alone could have brought us here.

“You know,” she continues with traces of scorn in her voice, “if you’ve seen one egg you’ve seen them all.” She talks dismissively of the foreign architect who’d been called in to supervise, the enormous crane that had been required, and all the laborers who had been imported, “because of course we couldn’t have been expected to do such work ourselves.” And to think of the outrageous sums which had been spent to construct a great stone egg out in the middle of nowhere. Paff: she had no time for such foolish things. There was work to do; life was hard in these small villages, and of what possible use were stone eggs when the fences were forever in need of repair?

And then there it is: la Sentinelle, just a kilometer or two further up this isolated mountain road, as the road curves gently right around a field of stubbled hay, the egg waiting for us gnomically beneath its pine. It seems to me a perfect way to encounter a work of art.

The sight is absolutely mesmerizing, to find this enigmatic object so far from any apparent human habitation, with just the mountains on all sides rearing their stoney heads into a lightly clouded sky. I think of the puzzle it must be to all who accidentally encounter it, and the legends which will gradually grow around it as its true origin and meaning fade gradually away.

The true horizon is hidden by these overlapping islands, their ragged profiles torn from a black more dense than night. And there are the mysteries: the lights gathered into communities — Crofton to the south, Chemainus, and eventually Saltair. Further: Ladysmith’s small smear behind the hills; the blinking beacon of an airport towards the north. And the constellations always in order above.

You wonder: how does the universe behave without us to observe it? Do we play a vital role in maintaining cosmic order, on this smoothed block of sandstone, remarking softly on all we see?

Do unwatched stars shift their positions like some intergalactic Times Square marquée? Will the sea’s mirror host antic reflections, the skiff hitching a sailboat’s smudged double to its waterline as a small girl dons an adult’s skirt for fun? Will the cities themselves play leapfrog up and down the coastline, when the human world is occupied in other dreams?

For now, though, you are pivot to a universal harmony, as the patient night waits to execute its anarchic designs.