Home Foreign Accents SEE YOU IN SAINT-REMY… A remedy to your seasonal Hampton allergies.

SEE YOU IN SAINT-REMY… A remedy to your seasonal Hampton allergies.

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-profiter: actually not to take profit, but simplistically to enjoy, really a very tricky hedonistic concept designed to perniciously infuse the very idea of pleasure with a double-sided sword that serves guilt on either side. One must always take advantage of every drop of available pleasure, as opposed to letting it go to waste. Let’s not talk, right off, about the potential wasting away of cash-filled bank and hymen-retaining virgins. Rather, let’s go to sunshine.

In terms of the sun, for instance, it’s very debatable to decide what profiting would consist of as an action, aside from making sure one is directly the sun’s rays when its shining rather than being in the house doing whatever, which could be done just as well if there were clouds around. But it’s not enough to just be in the sun. To profiter of the sun is a sort of mental contraption which attaches the joy of being with the sun with the luck that we have of being in the sun, after all, we could be dying an untimely death under bacterial bombs or working in an office, or it could be raining, or we could have some terribly purulent skin infection that would make sitting in the sun painful instead of pleasurable.

Profiter is the consciousness of the precious elusiveness of pleasure projected on the experience of pleasure itself. Terribly french but also very much the misnomer in practice as Cioran pointed out : “Whereas one needs all the sensitivity of a scorched spirit or a morbid intimacy with the void to associate the awareness of happiness to happiness itself, Pain and the awareness of pain are indistinguishable even in the damnedest idiot” (approximate translation – you get the idea).

So the first guilt comes from your un-derserved luck for having received the gift of this enjoyment. The second guilt comes if this enjoyment had been given, made available to you and YOU TURNED IT DOWN, mainly by staying in the house reading junk mail or wandering aimlessly in semi-shaded lands as opposed to dutifully enjoying the proffered pool-side sun. So, anyway you slice it, you lose, this is the catholic credo and yes, this is how Marie-Antoinette got her head chopped off.

“blanc-manger”:  delicious merger of whipped cream, raspberries and a panacotta-type concoction, sort of sweet, creamy clouds engulfing the tangy tartness, with some raspberry sauce and basil to spike the finish.

– “Saint-Germain – Liqueur de Sureau”
: Elderflower liqueur.  A fragrant little liquid something, lingering somewhere between litchi, lemon, passionfruit and pear, especially delicious with champagne, or exquisitely refreshing with perrier and lime – you’re in luck, thanks to the 6eme arrondissement philly people, it’s available at your local liquor store, that’s right, even in NYC.

(website, locations :  ( http://www.stgermain.fr )

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