Nice, Monaco, Corsica

Of Oran, the city of his childhood, Albert Camus had said, “these are lands of innocence.” It was these words that I could not escape through my days in the South of France and on Corsica; Nice and France are, an ocean away, much different from Oran and Algeria, and Camus’s notion of such innocence, pantheistic and near-primal, doesn’t apply quite so well to these places, but the resonance of lands built by the coast of the Mediterranean, under uninterrupted days of sun, rang persistent. To us in a different age, this may perhaps be as close as we can get to his innocence. I felt that some in Nice, both at a villa set upon the mountains with a clear view down to the undulating city and still, matte ocean, and in a converted worker’s flat, un-air conditioned and but a few dusty steps away from the pier, in that slow, unhurried pace and smell of warmth that permeates the air, the chattering of pebbles and feet that walk upon them, ship horns and the glint of numerous rays and salt on the back of the hand and in the hair. It was there, less, but there still in Monaco, down quiet streets beneath old looming city walls, among buildings of all styles and identities, against the dolosse enabling the safe havens of wealth and extravagance, and concrete constructions made of sands from many miles away. But this innocence was most present, of course, in Corsica. We, as the only foreigners, inundated by the native language of Camus, undeserving recipients of a kindness present only far away, driving around Cap Corse, its villages, harbours, beaches. At the vantage point at Moulin Mattei, too, from where one looks upon the east and the west, there too the glimmer of the sun off the ocean is soft, gentle, lulling you into a breathless trance, eyes transfixed upon mirrored gradients, with but imperfect ships marring a dream-like surface. The colours are innocent; not of man, not capable of man, and gone by the time you reach the water’s edge, replaced by reflections and buoys and laughter. Yet even they are innocent, and you can’t help but hold your breath, to listen close to the life around. And that is the innocence of our age—not what is far from the civilised man, but that what we do not know and do not understand.