When we took our #82 bus to the town of Eze high up in the hills on the coast overlooking the Mediterranean I thought today we’d be, well, at ease in Eze. So the minute I stepped off the bus I plopped down at a nearby café and ordered cappuccino along with the rich pastry du jour.
Ella wrinkled her nose at pausing for an over-sugared pit stop and said she’d meet me “up the road.” The “road” being an asphalt path that led to one of those endless stone stairways that switch back and forth up yet another promontory with a dizzying view of the Coté d’Azur.
Okay, that’s a pretty good vista to eyeball. I wasn’t going to miss a chance at taking it in, so I started grinding my way up the steps when I noticed the “Nietzsche Path” that went off to my left down to the sea. I remember reading in “I Am Dynamite” about how Nietzsche, who suffered from crippling migraines, would recover from his episodes by hiking in the Alps and trekking the hills above Nice. He regularly got strenuous exercise on this steep trail and was said to have come up with the final version of the third part of his “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” while doing so. That’s the part where he conceives the notion of “the eternal recurrence of the same”. It’s the kind of thought that might occur to you if, steeped in the Greek classics, you hiked the same trail every day and at some point gazed at the unruffled waters of the Mediterranean Sea. In the same section of this philosophical fiction Nietzsche first broached the idea of the Übermensch, and I suppose the endorphins one would get from climbing Eze’s slopes might give you that über feeling at the end of the day.
Ella convinced me that no good thought would come to me if I spent an hour stumbling down to the sea and then spent another hour-plus huffing my endorphins up the slope. So I chugged up the steps behind the flow of tourists en route to the hilltop village of Eze. They certainly had an über skip to their step; I wondered if Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” was playing in their minds as they ascended. The tune I was hearing was Stones’ “Beast of Burden.” Just my luck that I was trying to keep up with a robust squadron of Zarathustrians.
Ella was at the top waiting for me. As Mediterranean promontory views go, it was pretty damn good.
And the exotic gardens in-and-around the village complete with natural grottoes felt like the kind of secret lair a medieval hermit might hide in.
Walking through the village, we ducked into a hole-in-the-wall art gallery and I had one of those epiphanies that happen while traveling. As the sign outside indicated, it was a gallery devoted to romantic paintings.
The one that got my attention, a study ready to be a flighty casino mural, had a Chagall-soaring figure that could have been Marcel Proust dressed for an evening at the Guermantes. My recent visits to Paris, Nice, and Monte Carlo were combined in one picture.
The recurring motifs might not have been part of Nietzsche’s eternal pattern, but I liked the way they compressed time instead of extending it. The ideal would be travel at the end of the trip expressed as a collage.