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Learn How To Change, and You’ll Never Die
The battle of light and dark isn’t meant to be won
Collioure never gets old.
I’ve been here maybe half a dozen times now. But the hilly streets, the ancient cobblestones, the blazing bougainvillea and, at the end of seemingly every street, the whispering sea makes this a place you don’t get tired of coming to.
It’s the Mediterranean I dreamed of, the placid and radiant beauty that wrapped flowering vines around my heart in Greece and Italy and finally in France, making me want to build a life here.
It’s not just me. This town of fewer than 3000 people receives 3.5 million visitors each year. This is France, but it feels a million miles away from the rainy streets of Paris, the glittering chandeliers of Versaille, the roaring waves and rolling vineyards of Bordeaux. This is more like — whisper it with holy dread — a kind of French Amalfi coast, a Gallic parallel to that shivering and tourist-haunted wonderland across the same sea, hidden by the brute blue shoulder of the world.
Beauty is a target, a high wild cry in the middle of the night. It makes you vulnerable. It makes you desired. To possess a thing, we know, is to destroy it. The beauties we can own are never safe.
