The Dordogne

After a long run in the park today, I went down to 35th street to eat a korean rice-cake and dumpling soup. The waiter, who resembles my uncle and who I recognized on the street the other day dressed fashionably in black, asked, before I even sat down, if I wanted number 50. I said, no, and he asked again, and I said, no, again. As soon as I sat down, I looked in the menu and saw that number 50 was something I had never ordered before.

At the table next to me were a white man who seemed to be in his fifties and a black man who seemed to be still in graduate school enthusiastically engaged in conversation. Over the course of about half an hour, they covered topics including chartered buses (which the black man was was getting his license to drive, although he had gone to Carnegie Mellon, which the white man mentioned was "one of the best schools in the country"), the funeral of Ronald Reagan, who the white man called a pig, the cuisine in Bologna, Bill Clinton giving a talk to a group of elderly black ladies who, the white man said, he had "eating out of his hand," and traveling. The white man was explaining that his brother, who had gotten his MFA at RISD and eventually became the art director of Time magazine, where he was making lots of money, one day dropped everything and went off to Egypt, and said that Egypt was "a place that exceeded your expectations." Then he asked the black man where he had been that exceeded his expectations, and I thought, the Dordogne.

I went to the Dordogne, in France, when I was 16, as part of an art program run by Parsons that entailed two weeks in the Dordogne followed by two weeks in Paris. We were in the Dordogne primarily to see the cave paintings, which were about 15,000 to 20,000 years old. I had seen images of some of these paintings in history books in elementary school and wasn't very excited to see them in real life. They seemed like the typical scratches one would expect cave people to produce, and I wasn't sure about the purpose for young art students of seeing something so primitive. But when I saw them, I saw that they were as expressive, aesthetically interesting, and technically sophisticated as anything that had ever been produced since. It was then that I thought, despite all our scientific developments, the spirit of human beings has, since their beginning, remained the same.

Apart from the cave paintings, many other things in the Dordogne exceeded my expectations; the landscape and people were more beautiful, the bread and croissants more delicious, the people friendlier, the air softer and milder. In comparison, Paris was disappointing.