A habit we’ve cultivated in the last two months seems to be ending. In the evenings, both on weekdays and during weekends when we aren’t out someplace, wife and I sit in our west-facing balcony, reading. The floating clouds impart a sense of movement to the landscape. (Movement, I learned during those train journeys the last three years, stimulates thought; a window seat in a train is an excellent place to spend as much time thinking as you do reading.) Occasionally they create dramatic scenes on the blue canvas, like the fuzzy but promising beginnings of a large painting. When the clouds give way, partially or fully, sunsets are magnificent.
Straddling the border between France and Germany, the fortress town of Belfort is unremarkable save for a large sculpture – by Frédéric Bartholdi, designer of the Statue of Liberty – of a lion carved into the cliff that forms a natural wall of the fortress. The lion, its head reared up in pride, is more striking at night, when artificial lights accentuate the lines and contours and the figure seems to emerge, in triumph, out of the cliff. But this star attraction is all but ignored by the fifty thousand or so people who visit the town each year in May, during the three days it hosts FIMU: Festival International de Musique Universitaire. 
Parmanu 