Traveling to France

The plan is to spend a few days in Paris, then take the train to Clermont-Ferrand. They have friends in a small village near Clermont.

They'll travel light, as they'll be riding bicycles southwest from the village in the Auvergne to Avignon.

He's allowed himself one book--Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil--in which a single utterance may be worth any number of novels or histories.

Opening the book just before he packs it into his duffel bag, he reads:

    We know by means of our intelligence that
    what the intelligence does not comprehend
    is more real than what it does comprehend. 

Such a statement might stay with him as he passes through miles and miles of French countryside.

He promises to file reports from the front.