In Love with France, At Home In Italy

I have a new friend who already feels like an old friend. Never mind that we are about two decades apart in age. E has lived in Orvieto for more than 50 years, and generously serves as the doyenne of the surprisingly large and mutually devoted ex-pat community with whom we connected last year.   E and I have become Writing Partners--a relationship I have sought ever since hearing about the concept in an article in the newsletter of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars. For two years, I was president of a local pioneer organization in the movement, but after many years of writing the newsletter (and more), I pretty much burned out. The group was especially valuable to me when I was a first-time mother with a hard-won doctorate trying to figure out how to engage with my new home town. I'm sure I owe my having been hired to teach at the university to connections that I made in this group.  Originally founded by brainy and accomplished spouses ...

I've reached an age when it's time to consider more closely the Big Questions--whether to go gently into the night having poured my soul into painstakingly crafted emails to friends, or to aim for something in another form. In my field of French literature, I find sobering the image of bookstore remainder tables filled with hard-won works of scholarship by my famous colleagues who have (as L, who died this week, put it) "cast their lot with the profession." In using that phrase, she had been referring to a particularly ambitious and briefly successful (before they burned out) wing of the independent scholarship movement. What does it mean that our own little independent scholars' group that has always had more modest aspirations is still going, even if L is not? I am also haunted by the image of a famously talented writer who was said to have "wasted her brilliance writing copy for cereal boxes." An inveterate clutter-bug (my family is missing the t...