The Mountains of Paris : How Awe and Wonder Rewrote My Life / David Oates.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Oates, David, 1927-2004, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Oates, David, 1950---Travel--France--Paris.

Oates, David.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (193 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Corvallis, OR : Oregon State University Press, [2019]

Summary:

"Living in Paris for a winter and a spring and waking each morning to a view of Notre Dame, David Oates is led to revise his life story from one of trudging and occasional woe into one punctuated by nourishing and sometimes unsettling brilliance. In The Mountains of Paris, he offers a technique of reimagining one's life story that might be available to anyone. The present tense of the book takes place during the seasons he spends in Paris, sharing an artist's residency. It is a rare opportunity to consider what it means to be human, through time-stopping moments with music, art, and deep history. The past tense of the book offers memories that intrude into the bustle of Paris life: a Billy Graham crusade at age thirteen, a mountain pass, a love, a loss. In long years of mountaineering Oates fought the self-loathing which had infused him as the gay kid in the Baptist pew. In The Mountains of Paris, he ascends to a place of wonder through intense, personal narrative encounter with the strangeness of being alive. In his searching, luminous, and inimitable prose, Oates invites readers to share the sense of awe awakened by a Vermeer painting, or the night sky, or the echoing strains of music fading down a Paris street, lifting the curtain on a cosmos filled with a terrifying yet beautiful rightness"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Prologue : the night walk (memnoir)

St. Eustache

At home (or not) in Paris

The flatness (memnoir)

Schubert : it is a question

Balthasar Denner, Bill Viola : the grace of humans

Schlock and awe (memnoir)

Mount St. Sublime

Bosch in the burning world

Voices (memnoir)

Schubert II : counting time

Beyond Goddard Canyon

St. Eustache II : the sound world

Schubert III : changing my mind

The mysterious barricades (memnoir)

Vermeer and Rembrandt

Beyond Goddard Canyon II : vasty love and the big comedown (memnoir)

Umpteenth Brumaire

Sehnsucht and the deep present (memnoir)

The pocket sublime

Twombly : do not say

Reading in Paris

Picasso : public and private

The enormous alphabet (memnoir)

St. Eustache III : solidarity and the sublime

Epilogue - getting out of the way.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-87071-982-3