All titles may not be immediately available. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E_T A L K What are your favorite posh hotels? Put on the Ritz in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk. R E C E N T L Y Learning to love the abyss By Maria Dolan Snowboarding is a lot like life -- full of scary slopes, big spills and tiny triumphs (12/10/97) "How do you celebrate Christmas?" By Joshua Cohen A Jew in China: The travails of life in a land where Westerner equals Christian (12/09/97) Road Warrior By Dawn MacKeen Are airlines delivering sexist service in first class? (12/08/97) Mondo Weirdo By Lori Makabe When bed bugs attack! (12/05/97) Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer Herbed olive oil holiday gifts (12/05/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A full list of all Wanderlust articles		______fifty years of europe | E X C E R P T | By Jan Morris 366 pages Nonfiction Villard + + + + + + + + BY DON GEORGE | For the past 50 years, Welsh writer Jan Morris has been dauntlessly exploring the world and eloquently describing her explorations, initially for British newspapers, later for Rolling Stone magazine and then for magazines and newspapers around the world. During those decades, she has also produced some 30 books, many of which are considered travel classics, including "Pax Britannica," "The World of Venice," "The Matter of Wales," Spain," "Oxford," "Sydney" and "Hong Kong." Her new book, "Fifty Years of Europe: An Album," is in many ways the culmination of her career as a traveler and a writer. Brilliantly organized as a series of vignettes grouped around five themes -- religion, ethnic identity, nation-building, commonalities and attempts at union -- "Fifty Years" brings together all the qualities that distinguish Morris' best travel writing: an eye for the telling detail and anecdote; an immense knowledge of history, politics, literature and art; a sensitivity to the common and everyday; an extraordinarily vivid and musical prose; and finally an unfailing cheerfulness, humility and sense of humor. To my mind, Morris is the greatest travel writer alive today -- "travel writer" in the grandest sense of one who captures a place in all its fullness and profundity. And "Fifty Years" embodies and illuminates the wide-ranging riches of this art. In its innovative organization, the book is a departure; in its range and depth of subject, it is a synthesis. In total -- as the excerpts we offer here can only barely suggest -- it is Morris' chef d-oeuvre. + + + + + + + + In the country The French countryside of my youth often looked (at least in my memory now) like a slow ballet of horsedrawn plows -- plows wherever you looked, some going one way, some another, serenaded by soaring songbirds and watched by rich fat cattle. France seemed to me then permanently old-fashioned. It was still peasant country, I used to think. The Alpine village I settled in for a while in the 1950s was several generations behind the times. In the autumn it used to be visited by an itinerant steam distillery, and with much chuffing and hissing its apple crop was turned into a powerful kind of schnapps, to be tasted in back kitchens beside steaming cauldrons of soup more or less permanently simmering on the stove. I collected our mail each day from the village bar, for there in midmorning I knew I would find the postman enjoying his cognac. I doubt if a single Percheron draws a single plow in France now. Most of the birds seem to be of the invisibly chirpy persuasion, twitching about in copses, and the cattle are mostly anaemic Charollais, which look as though they have been drained of their blood for the making of black puddings. Even in our village of Savoie the ski culture has fallen upon the old ways, the high cow chalets have been turned into holiday homes, and I doubt if the postman has time for his midmorning brandy. For me the lost innocence of Europe, itself no more than the product of a romantic imagination in its youth, will remain always a memory of long ago in France. + + + + + + + + An Invitation Allow me to invite you to Sunday lunch at a French country restaurant of the old kind, circa 1955. Neither fast food nor gastronomic pretension has yet corrupted the establishment, which is in one of those ancient towns of central France where the streets wind upward from the railway track, through scowling walls of medievalism, until they debouch in the square outside the cathedral door, surveyed by huge stone animals from the cathedral tower and prowled around on Sunday mornings by cats and desultory tourists. The restaurant displays its menu in a large flowery script in a brass frame, and in most respects remains more or less as it has been for several centuries. Madame the proprietress looks an epitome of everything false and narrow-minded. One waiter seems to be some sort of duke, the other is evidently the village idiot. At the table next to ours sits a prosperous local family out for its Sunday dinner, well-known to the proprietress and esteemed throughout the community -- solemn, voluminously napkined, serious and consistent eaters who eye us out of the corners of their piggy eyes as they chew their veal. The veal is, as a matter of fact, rather stringy. I do not doubt the bill will be erroneous. I am sure Madame despises us as much as we distrust her. But what a contrary delight it all is, is it not? How nourishing still the vegetables, fresh from Madame's garden! How excellent the wine, from the vineyard down the hill! How stately that duke! How endearing the idiot! How mollifying the farewells of the family at the next table, when with bows and cautious smiles they fold their napkins and leave us! How persuasive, after all, even the steely charm of Madame herself! With real gratitude we wrap the old-fashioned Frenchness of that luncheon around us like a cloak, and return cherished to the world of the 1990s. Ah, où sont les déjeuners d'antan? + + + + + + + + All is not lost But all is not lost! More successfully than most countries, France has achieved an equilibrium between the old and the new. As the twentieth century draws toward its close the French are indeed a very modern people. I first really felt in touch with cyberspace in the 1980s when, visiting a French country inn somewhere, I found the chef calling up his day's luncheon menu on a computer, from some central database of gastronomy. Today nothing seems to me quite so elegantly futuristic as the solar-powered telephones that gently revolve, like sunflowers, beside French autoroutes. No capital in Europe is more smoothly organized than Paris, and a true image of our fin de siècle is the spectacle of the great Paris-Lyon-Marseilles Train à Grand Vitesse sweeping down the Rhone valley at 180 mph. Yet by most standards life in the French countryside still seems amiably and enviably close to the soil. The songbirds may have gone, but the swallows still whirl around on summer evenings. Widowers shout greetings to each other as they wobble home on their bicycles, long loaves protruding from their saddlebags. Gentlefolk stroll in the autumnal gardens of their villas. At the wood's edge the logs are still chopped and Virgilianly piled. Aromatic smoke lingers. The buzz of the vélomoteur merges comfortably -- well, fairly comfortably -- with the buzz of the bees. Picnic parties spread their cloths beside dragonfly pools as in painters' fancies long ago. More happily than anywhere else trees and rivers, cities and highways, seem to coexist by mutual arrangement, a harmonious balance between the natural and the invented. For me one of the most comforting components of this arrangement is the continuing French attitude toward animals. French people seem to recognize what Montaigne, the patron saint of animal equality, called, "a certain obligation and mixed commerce" between man and beast. We may forcefeed you for your liver, they seem to say to their fellow creatures, boil you alive, snare you on migrations or bottle you in brine, but at least we will deal with you man, so to speak, to man. I raised the matter once at a café beside whose door a very fat and surly golden Labrador lay sluggishily where everyone would trip over it. It was a very old dog, said the proprietor, one did not care to disturb the animal: but when I mentioned Montaigne's notion of commerce and obligation he seemed to think it mere sophistry. "I owe the dog nothing, it owes me nothing, one day it will die and then -- pfft!" The dog did not budge an inch as, precariously balancing my coffee cup, I stepped across it to find a table on the patio outside: but remembering where I was, I restrained myself from giving it a good kick as I passed, to hasten the pfft. + + + + + + + + A fling of France What I love to do is to drive on a bright sunny day, with the roof of the car open, at a scudding speed around the Périphérique, the ring road that surrounds the city of Paris. The scudding speed is advisable, or awful French drivers will more or less run you off the road. The sunny day is essential, because it turns an expedition that could be dismal, exhausting or even alarming into an exhilarating fling of France. The road snakes around the capital, rather than circling it, and offers jerky flashes of Frenchness as in an avant-garde silent movie: now a drab industrial quarter, now a pictorial row of poplars -- a tedious white housing estate, barges chugging down a canal -- a grand boulevard for an instant, a cluster of medieval houses, the sudden swoosh of a tunnel, a couple of vast juggernauts deafeningly overtaking you -- and always present, brooding but radiant, just off-stage the most magnificent capital in Europe. This is not only France encapsulated: to my mind it is 1990s France all over. For most of us by now, for most of the time, France is a sequence of flashes, a kaleidoscope repeatedly shaken as we hurry across its varied landscapes to the particular French spot that means most to us. When the milords traveled this way in their creaking high-wheeled carriages it must have been more of a continuum, and the slowly passing scenes had a classical clarity, shaped and ample despite the frightful bumps in the road. Now we are all surrealists, and as France hurtles through our windshields and away through our rearview mirrors its images are disjointed and contradictory. You want tragedy? It hangs to this day over the elegiac trench-landscapes of the north. You want hedonism? Napkined tables beckon to us through the windows of snug and steamy restaurants as we rush by, wine awaits the tasting in a thousand hospitable caves. Wildness? Bleak bare places are around us now: granite places, moorland, heroic monasteries, uninviting hotels on mountain passes. Romance? Here is the sweet creeping in of violets, ochers and tawny browns that speak of the Mediterranean. Marsh country of the Gypsies, pale estuaries of oystermen, windy grasslands where menhirs stand and Celtic names jump out at us from roadside signs in the rain -- all this, all this grand fling of France, comes into my mind as I drive around the Paris ring road: and now that France itself is so relentlessly, so furiously on the go, I sometimes feel that the grand old nation itself is pounding, head down, foot on the floor, radio blaring, around its own historical Périphérique. + + + + + + + + N E X T+P A G E+| The look of an Englishman, German style