A quarter-century ago, with an old childhood friend I bought a former mill in the poorest and least populated part of France: the Eastern Pyrenees. The Spanish border is thirty kilometers to the south along winding roads. The nearest village is three kilometers away also by winding roads, although on the overgrown footpath up the side of the hills you can get there in twenty minutes. I am the only one who takes the path anymore, though in preceding centuries the villagers used it to come down and wait for their grain to be ground. There are actually two mills—the flour mill and the tiny olive oil mill that faces it. When I visit, I like to stay in the olive oil mill, which the people in the area call la moulinette to distinguish it from the flour mill, le moulin. This is dry, rugged country—not the sort of France people usually picture. Shards of granite surge up from the parched earth for hundreds of meters.

In those twenty-five years a generation of old folks who spent their lives toiling in the grape fields, who lived through the Nazi occupation, and who spoke a heavily accented, nasal French that Parisians could not understand, have died off. The stoic mill looks the same as always—the same as it did when it was an active mill in earlier centuries—but the world around it has changed. The simple but wise people, who mended their clothes, stored up potatoes for the year, hunted wild boar every autumn and then made civet de sanglier (wild boar stew) during the winter, have been replaced by people who work in the towns and city, who buy stylish clothes, and who drive fast cars on the winding roads. I no longer walk up to the village to raise a glass with an old timer and listen to his stories of sixty or seventy years ago. There is no one with those memories to raise a glass with.

In the pantry I still have a bottle of vin de noix (walnut wine) from Jeannot Delmas who died three years ago. It can keep for ages. It was begun by his parents when he was born, and as it was drunk, new brandy would be added each year. Jeannot died in a nursing home during the pandemic; he was in his eighties. But he was fond of pointing out that the vin de noix still had a bit of spirits from the year of his birth. That bottle is precious to me now because the links to the past of this place are growing more tenuous every day. In fact, the whole world seems to be losing contact with the past and what it can learn from it.

It is September 2025. In the evening, I sit out and watch as the bats come out for the night, looping around and scooping up insects as they have done for an eternity. It is absolutely silent except for the air filtering through the trees, and on some nights there is not even a breeze. All is at peace, and if you sit here, you would never know about any of the conflicts and horrors taking place around the world. There is no Gaza, there is no Ukraine, no Darfur, there are no hatreds between left and right. The bats often come straight toward me, but they always turn away in time. They never collide with anything. Later the wild boars will come out. I hear them rooting around during the night, digging for things in the earth. In the past few days, however, I’ve seen more deer than boars. You can go hiking in the woods—and I am surrounded by woods—and never see a deer or a boar. You would think you are all alone among the trees. But the animals are there, and they can see you. It was Baudelaire who said that nature is a temple and that man passes through forests that are observing us. The animals’ eyes are on us.

A couple of years ago, a wild boar was wreaking havoc in the little village (pop. 100) up above the moulin, getting into stores of food in the middle of the night. The mayor put out the word that it was his job and his job alone to take care of the boar. The next time someone called him after midnight to say the boar was active, the mayor took his rifle, went out, and dispatched the animal. The village had a communal dinner a few months later, after the meat had marinated sufficiently.

As I have said, the moulin is an oasis of peace and quiet. When the wind dies down, there is absolute stillness. This is because it is September. When I have been here in the summer, the cicadas start up as soon as the sun hits them, and the racket of their mechanical sawing continues all day. They have no idea why they do it. The sun hits them and they begin to scrape their abdomens in absolute unison; their perfect rhythm would be the envy of the finest marching band. It is extraordinary how loud cicadas can be—the whole forest shimmers with the noise. And then in the evening they stop. I have often tried to identify the moment when the final cicada leaves off, and I almost always miss it. Then one morning when the sun comes up there are no cicadas whatsoever. During the night they have all decamped to higher in the mountains.

The force of nature here is enormous. But if the terrible conflicts that clog my consciousness every day back home do not seem to intrude here, it is not as if modern problems do not arise at all. There is no ignoring climate change here. This area has always been dry, but it always received rain in the winter and the spring. For two years, however, there has hardly been any precipitation. For two years the stream that runs behind the mill and that used to run under both houses to power the millstones has been dry. For two years there have been forest fires in nearby areas because everything can burn so easily. For two years no one has been allowed to irrigate a garden, and some villages have even had to have water trucked in because they have none of their own. From where I sit looking out over the hills, I can see dead trees. My own fig tree has hardly produced this year, while the cactuses have gone wild. If this process continues—and accelerates—it will be the death of this beauty. And it will continue.

But then, France is in crisis, and while the drought in this part of the country is very serious, it is not seen as the most immediate problem. The country has an enormous debt that gets bigger by the day. Today is in fact the day of a nationwide strike: trains are not running, nor planes, and the autoroutes in and out of Paris are blocked. Even many doctors have agreed to shutter their offices for the day, and pharmacies are closed. Because my mill is located in the middle of nowhere, the country roads are clear here. I do not need to go into town today, so the strike will pass me by completely. When I went running on the twisting roads this morning, there was no sign whatsoever of the national strike. But if you try to drive to Paris today, you will not get there.

I look at the hill across from me, covered in hundreds, thousands of trees. Largely chênes verts, which local people will tell you have no value. At least, no commercial value. And yet the crowded array of them is a magnificent canvas. We are unable to penetrate the mystery of such beauty. There are hundreds of different greens mixed in and among the trees. And not just greens. If you look closely, you can see that there are yellows and pinks in the bark, and greens that are almost blue or gray. We cannot possibly understand all this. How strange that we, as humans, see these forests as something beautiful. We see them aesthetically. Certainly, the animals hidden in and among them do not think of them as a majestic tapestry of beauty. In among the branches and the leaves acts of violence and cruelty are taking place, as one insect attacks another and one animal eats another. We see none of that.

And what are the trees? The trees do not know they are trees. In fact, they are so different, one from another, that I have to wonder why we stamp a single word on the variegated, nuanced nature of each and every one. There are trees, young and old. There are desiccated trees, and ones that are clearly dead. There are seedlings. And not just chênes verts but also cedars and pines and many more species.

I also find it extraordinary that throughout this region there are thousands of kilometers of stone walls built hundreds of years ago. They are everywhere. I can see some now on the hill opposite me. If you go hiking in even the most remote areas, you will come across old stone walls, terraced ones as well sometimes. How much labor went into making them! People had to carry each stone, one by one, and place it—thousands of them just to make a wall of a few hundred meters. They knew why they were doing it. Each wall represented a plan for that parcel of earth, a project that they were committed to. Now, those projects are lost to us. Why a crumbling wall in the middle of the forest was first built is a mystery.

I sit and look at the other mill that faces me. It was the first mill—the flour mill. In the cellar there is still the enormous millstone that was cut out down at Les Albas, a kilometer down the hill, and then wrenched up to the moulin. There are two other millstones buried in the floor of the cellar. When a stone got too worn or if it cracked, they would dig out the floor and roll the stone into it, then get another and haul it up. The process must have taken days, even weeks. The last millstone, still in the wooden box with the feeder of grain above it, is also cracked, but that is because when it went out of service, you had to crack the stone so that it could not be run au noir (illegally). It was last in service during World War I.

I look at the flour mill that faces me and think about the generations of people who lived there—who lived there before electricity, before plumbing, before gas stoves and electric heaters. The mill passed down, father to son. It is small, but for its time it must have seemed quite roomy: a kitchen/salon, two bedrooms. Somewhere outside must have been the outhouse. People lived in much more cramped spaces in the past without thinking that they were cramped. People who had only one bedroom often slept with the children’s heads at one end of the bed and the parents’ at the other. It is bracing to imagine all the lives lived in that little house, sleeping, eating, mating, dying. Beside the cellar was another little room which was the oven for baking bread. The owner before me turned it into a bathroom. I understand the practicality of the endeavor, but how wonderful it would be to still have an enormous bread oven!

In the moulinette I have a small bread oven, however. A marvelous wood oven that my friend, Vincent, who knows how to do everything, built. The first time I made a fire in it and watched the smoke slip out and up the little flue, I was amazed. When I next saw Vincent, I said, you obviously have done this many times. No, he said. But then, you read up on how to do it, I answered. No, he said again, I just figured I would know how to do it. But then, Vincent is still like the old people who used to populate the village. With his two hands he can accomplish extraordinary things. He seems always to be building a house for a family member or a friend.

The land in the Eastern Pyrenees has never been good for growing anything but grapes for wine. They make some excellent wines in the region now. They didn’t used to, but that was because they cut the grape juice with sugar to increase the yield. The result was plonk. The old guys talked of carrying 50-kilo sacks of sugar into the cave coopérative when they were young. But that has changed. As a friend here says, it is not hard to make good wine, only to make great wine. Still, this land was never good for raising animals or producing grains. Any farming was subsistence farming. The ground is too rocky for other crops.

Drive north fifteen kilometers, however, and the landscape changes completely. There are verdant meadows and wealthy farms raising cattle. Large bales of hay are rolled up and stacked. Forests are logged. The world feels lush and welcoming. Gone is the stern rigor of the Eastern Pyrenees. And in fact, at that point you have crossed over into another département entirely, called L’Aude.

I went for a drive in the Aude yesterday with no particular plan other than to get lost on tiny country roads. I simply followed the signs from village to village, always choosing the one whose name began with “Saint”: “Saint Louis et Parahou,” followed by “Saint Julia de Bec,” then “Saint Just et le Bézu,” and finally “Saint Ferriol.” These were really hamlets—clusters of eight or nine houses. People would track my car with their eyes as I crept through the narrow passages between the houses. They knew my car was from elsewhere. In one hamlet two old women were sitting out, having coffee, and they looked at me as though they had not seen anyone pass by for a week. Then, after Saint Ferriol, I watched for the name of a town that I recognized and took that road. Within a half hour I was back in known country. Even in this part of France you never have to go more than ten kilometers or so before you come across a village. When I tell Frenchmen of the wilderness areas in North America where you can go backpacking and not come across anyone for a week, they are dumbfounded.

This morning a rare thunderstorm has exploded. Usually even when they promise rain, it does not materialize. But this morning the wind begins to whip the trees, and the skies darken. A storm looks likely. Then with the first thunderclap the skies open up. Within seconds torrents of rain are streaming down the hills. Every channel, no matter how narrow, is gorged with water. Down near the sea there will be flooding. The storms have been known to wash away bridges in the lower parts.

The hills across the way are so shadowed by thick rain that it looks as if they are covered by smoke. Lightning flashes, rain pours off the roof in great sheets. Alas, a single rainstorm is not nearly enough to solve the problems of drought. The Matassa will still be dry after the storm passes through. But at least the rain tames the danger of forest fires, which have become a great concern here. They are small by North American standards—the “enormous” fire in the Aude in August consumed 16,000 hectares while those in Alberta, Canada, burnt hundreds of thousands of hectares. But, as they say in France, tout est relatif. Some states in the US are much bigger than all of France, and the provinces of Canada are bigger still.

Because I now have internet at the moulin I can see what the weather prognosis is, for what that is worth. The weather is, however, very hard to predict, and even when there are storms, I can sometimes stand in the space between the two mills and see the storm part and drop its rain to the left and to the right of me, without ever releasing so much as a drop where I am. Before I had internet, I never knew when a storm might be likely. Thunderstorms here arise with such suddenness that you can do nothing but submit to them. I was once hiking up the ridge near Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet. The valley in which Saint-Paul sits is lined by a high wall of sheer rock on either side, and I had climbed for over an hour up the steep face of it and had just gotten to the top when a violent storm broke over me. The peak of that ridge is so sharp that you can literally straddle it with one foot on either side. When the rain began to pelt me, I knew that there was no way I could safely descend in the storm, so I had no option but to set my rear end down on the ridge and wait it out. When the storm ended some thirty or forty minutes later, I was drenched, but immediately a hot sun began to beat down on me, almost steaming my clothes. By the time I made it back to my car an hour later, my clothes were dry.

In the summer months it is hot every day—really hot. But September is a month of change. At the beginning it is still summer, and the sun is murderous in the midafternoon. But over the course of the weeks, it is as though some divine spirit is turning down a cosmic dial: each day is noticeably shorter and each day gets a little cooler. When I arrived, I would get up a bit before six (I am an early riser) and see the first light in the sky over the hill facing me. The ridge of the hill slanting diagonally down always looks to me like torn construction paper, one piece for the sky and one for the hill. A few days later, it was still entirely dark at that hour. For a day or two, 6:15, then 6:30 had the same first glint of morning. But now, even at fifteen minutes before seven, it is still pitch black. I am used to the moulinette, so I can move through it in the dark with no problem. But I am always curious to see at what time I will be able to make out indistinctly the forms in the one room upstairs or the kitchen and salon downstairs.

I rise just before 6 AM, descend to the kitchen, and throw back the bolt on the big shutter that covers the entry door during the night. It is completely dark, and I step out into the mystery of the night world about to become day. These days it is quite chilly, and I enjoy the cold swirling around my half-naked body as I greet the new day. One morning it is absolutely still. Another, the wind is beating the trees. Another morning, I disturb an animal—no doubt a deer or a boar—who, startled, immediately takes off. After a few minutes, what was simply black turns into patches of gray-black and gray-blue, and I see one as the form of the lower mill and one as the great cedar tree that marks the property and another as the hill across the way whose ridge will soon be etched by the sun about to come up behind it. I am again in touch with centuries of mornings, thousands of years. This area has been inhabited by humans for a full million years.

Those eons have seen enormous jolts and reversals. Ice ages that have come and gone. Armies and marauders too. I wonder if the people centuries ago had a hard time putting together the beauty and peace of nature with the vicissitudes that came along with it. For days I realize that I am nagged by the knowledge that the life I am living here has a polar opposite half a world away where people are being killed and starved. There is no trace of the horrors here, and yet, for a person in the modern world there is no ignoring them. I realize that I do not know how to juggle both realities—to hold them before me at the same time. Almost as if responding to my thoughts, I hear someone talking outside one morning. When I open the door, it is a retired schoolteacher from the village. A friend has come to visit, and she has taken the liberty of bringing him down to the moulin. She says she wanted him to experience the magic of this place. But within minutes we are also commiserating that there is no turning away from the ills of the world but no way either to effect any change. How do we live with that? the friend asks, and the question hangs in the air as they leave.

There is of course no escaping the knowledge of the downward spiral of life on our planet. I often think of two writers in the 1940s and their very different reactions to the evil that was spreading. The very popular Stefan Zweig escaped to Brazil with his wife, but in 1942, everything seemed so hopeless that they took their lives. Also in 1942, Erich Auerbach escaped to Istanbul and then wrote his landmark opus, Mimesis, that celebrated the Western tradition all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Why did Auerbach hold out hope when Zweig could not? If Zweig and his wife had waited another year, they would have seen that the tide of the war was turning, and fascism would be defeated. Perhaps they could have regained hope.

When you take possession of a building that has housed people for centuries, it puts you in touch with the past. You come across things. The cellar here is replete with old tools and large wooden barrels that must have been for wine a century ago. Many of the objects are mundane: cans of screws and nails, coils of wires, old paint cans. Some are amusing: a rolled-up banner advertising some gasoline brand from the 1940s. Axes, hammers, clippers, hand drills, an old wheel for a car. Little things left from lives lived. But the people kept these things because they never knew when they might come in handy if they needed to repair something.

My image of that lost world is a pair of scissors here. A pair of ordinary shears. I think I first found them on the workbench in the cellar. They probably date from the early twentieth century. The handles evidently broke at some point, however, and so the last meunier (miller) twisted wire around each handle to repair them and went on using them. I still use them now, and in fact they work well. What I find interesting is that he did not think to go out and buy new shears. He realized that he could jig a repair and go on with them indefinitely. In any event, there was no centre commercial to run down to and pick up some new tools. Where had he bought these? Did he have to go down to Perpignan in a cart (a good day’s travel, maybe two), order them, and then wait months for the shears to arrive? Or was there an itinerant salesman who came by once or twice a year with such wares? I suspect that the idea of replacing the shears did not even occur to him. The handles were broken. So, he took some stout wire and wrapped them, twisting the ends of the wire tight with pliers. And now, a century later, I can still use them. And they work just fine.

The old fellows in the village who have died off in the past ten years or so were the same. Jeannot was proud of his storeroom. He took me down to show it to me more than once (the official reason was always to give me some potatoes from his stock). Everything was in its place, each tool carefully hung up: old hand drills, a two-man saw for cutting down thick trees, and every manner of files and clippers. Jeannot felt that there was no challenge he could not meet with his tools, no broken handle or blade or outil that he could not fix. And there was not a power tool in the whole place.

But the old world dies off, and for good or ill it is replaced by a new one. Last week I was walking in the village of Ansignan, three kilometers away, and at the little lookout at the top of the village an old woman began to talk to me. She told me, almost immediately, that she was a widow, that she was all alone, and that she was lonely. She said these things directly and simply, without having been prompted by any question about who she was or what her life was. There was, I knew, no alleviating her sadness and isolation, except to the extent of giving her ten minutes of my time and attention. I had the impression that for her there was no Gaza, no Sudan, no Ukraine. Perhaps she had a television and saw the evening news, but she was probably more concerned with how far her tiny pension would stretch and how easily she could get groceries. When I bid her goodbye, she said, it was nice to talk with you, Monsieur.

As I look at the mill and the hills around it, I have the impression that nothing else exists. Yes, I know that there is a village out of sight at the top of the hill. And there is the town twelve kilometers away where there you will find a supermarket and a gas station. Forty minutes from here is the autoroute. Within that radius there are no doubt thieves, swindlers, men who have beaten their wives—all the ills of society. But all I see here is a little stone house surrounded by endless forest, indifferent and venerable. It is as though time has never gone forward. It may be calming to dwell on that vista, but the modern world always hovers nearby.

What existed before disappears, transforms, morphs for good or ill. The old woman in Ansignan cannot get either her husband or her youth back. She is condemned to being alone. In Felluns, gentle, honorable Jeannot Delmas got dementia in his last years. He was always the most trustworthy and respected person in the village, and he often pointed out to me that he was the holder of the keys to thirty-four houses in the village. But dementia changed his personality entirely. Before the decision was made to move him into a home, there was a period during which he would swear at his wife Jannine, abusing her verbally. This development was both shocking and painful.

Modern science has enormous power to enable a body to continue to live long after the mind has been completely emptied. Was it better in an age in which the body was quickly exhausted and at its end long before the mind could wither? Most Westerners ingest, by the time they are about sixty, medicines that stave off heart attacks and strokes for many years. Doctors are able to perform open heart surgery or implant stents and valves that prolong lives far beyond what their terms would have been a century or two ago. But we do not have stents and valves for the mind. Our consciousness is fragile, and a slight change in its chemistry or the malfunction of a cell or two is enough to make us into a different person, though one that continues to inhabit the same body.

Like my mill, I too am caught between two worlds, the old and the new. In Canada I teach bright immigrant students who come from countries far from Europe and who speak languages at home that I cannot fathom. At the same time, the world I knew and that was already growing old when I first came to the mill is disappearing. Back in Canada, an Iraqi-Canadian student of mine who is twenty writes me an email suggesting that she and I make a TikTok video. I tell her that I am not of the TikTok generation. Besides what would be in the video? Just be yourself, she says. Tell stories about your life.

I tell her that the video would have no appeal. I say I am a bit like the cans of old nails and screws in the cellar here in the Pyrénées Orientales, which are useful mainly for repairing items when something breaks. I tell her that I am straddling two ages—one that is slipping into the past and another that is charging forward with enormous speed—a bit the way I once straddled the ridge at the top of the bluff near Saint-Paul. Can I simply sit down and wait for the storm? Will we all be drenched? Or will it divide and pummel to either side of me, leaving me in a magical space of peace?

These are questions to which I have no answers. In two days, I pack up my things and put away the plates and silverware at the moulin. A year usually passes before I can return. Sometimes friends come up from Spain to stay for a few days. What, I wonder, will I find a year from now?

This land has seen so much come and go. Time burnishes events, even terrible ones, making the jagged edges smooth. Battlefields that were once strewn with bodies become comely meadows. The land has a wisdom that surpasses our limited knowledge. We can admire it, we can love it, but we will never fully understand it. ■

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