Aaron Elkins

It had a bad Murillo, a bad Steen, a bad Tintoretto, and a bad Fragonard, and how many museums can you say that about? There was even a bad Velázquez, and that might just be unique.

They are there to catch the eyes of train passengers coming into Paris. Thus, when you approach from Paris, they're backward: OVLOV, ATIM, ATLONIM. You begin to wonder whether you're in the outskirts of Paris or Smolensk.

Everybody should have a Freudian psychotherapist for a friend. One’s life is simplified tremendously.

And being crippled over here wasn’t the same thing as it was in the States. You don’t see many people using aluminum walkers in the streets of Europe’s old cities, or blind people, or extremely elderly people. It’s just too hard to get around.

The potatoes were crisp, the gemischter Salat aggressively Teutonic—not thrown together willy-nilly, French-style, but with the marinated vegetables set in orderly ranks, each in its place.

(I’m still waiting for someone to explain neoplastic constructivism to me, for example, and I’ve lectured on the damn thing!

In Germany it is hard to be hungry for long without realizing it. The Germans are surely the munchingest people in the world.

It is rare to pass three pedestrians in a row without noticing that at least one of them is chewing on something that looks, sounds, and smells delicious. If they have to walk more than 150 feet without sight of a bakery or a Schnell lmbiss—a hot-snack stand—they become perceptibly anxious, even panicky.

People understandably assume that anything erected during the Renaissance was a work of art, but of course that isn’t so, any more than it is so that something built in the twentieth century is necessarily ugly, although there you’d have a better case.

Health or ethical grounds?” I asked.

“Both. Why eat all that cholesterol, and why slaughter cows or pigs or sheep when there are a lot of other ways to get protein?” He gave me the kind of look civilized beings reserve for carnivores, then said abruptly, “Hey, how about some fried chicken? There’s a Wienerwald a couple of blocks from here.”

I laughed. “Sure, but what have you got against chickens?”

He looked at me as if he couldn’t believe I’d ask so self-evident a question. “They’re ugly.”