Chalet Quotes

You did respond—your response was the worst kind—you did nothing.

Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation’s OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation (think of Psyche!) Is a paling stout and spikey? Won’t it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It’s a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough, Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!!

Now that the bad weather had come, we could leave Paris for a while for a place where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines and covering the road and the high hillsides and at an altitude where we would hear it creak as we walked home at night. Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go.

A pleasantly situated hotel close to the sea, and chalets by the water's edge where one breakfasted. Clientele well-to-do, and although I count myself no snob I cannot abide paper bags and orange peel. ("Not After Midnight")

Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies.... The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves - thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.

Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.

I'm not leaving." "I want you out of the city, and now. If the chalet doesn't suit you, go where you like. But you will go." "I have no intention of going anywhere." "Fuck it. You're fired." "Very well. I will remove my belongings and book a hotel until -- " "Oh, shut up. Both of you shut the hell up." She fisted her hands in her hair, yanked fiercely. "Just my luck, you finally say the words I've been waiting over a year to hear and I can't do my happy dance. You expect him to put his tail between his skinny legs and hide?" she demanded of Roarke. "You think when you're in the middle of this kind of mess he's just going to bop over to Switzerland and yodel, or whatever the hell they do there?

Next year he would suggest they hire a chalet on the edge of an icy fjord in Norway, as far away from the Jacobs family as possible.

Love, it seems to me, is the condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.

Imogene has twenty-two birdfeeders, some pole-mounted, some suspended from eaves, platform feeders and globe feeders, coffee can feeders and feeders that look like little Swiss chalets, and every evening, when she comes home from work, she drags a stepladder from one to the next, toting a bucket of mixed seeds, keeping them full. In

Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself. If this sounds paradoxical, remember Rilke’s admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which the self may flourish. As a child, I always felt uneasy and a little constrained around people, my family in particular. Solitude was bliss, but not easily obtained. Being always felt stressful- wherever I was there was something to do, someone to please, a duty to be completed, a role inadequately fulfilled: something amiss. Becoming, on the other hand, was relief. I was never so happy as when I was going somewhere on my own, and the longer it took to get there, the better. Walking was pleasurable, cycling enjoyable, bus journeys fun. But the train was very heaven.

Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go. Traveling third class on the train was not expensive. The pension cost very little more than we spent in Paris.

She thought, sometimes, that, after all, this was the happiest time of her life—the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste the full sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those lands with sonorous names where the days after marriage are full of laziness most suave. In post chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride slowly up steep road, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of a waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume of lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, hand in hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills? Perhaps she would have liked to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed her—the opportunity, the courage.

I used to think you could only grieve for things you'd actually lost.

chalet

Gustav Levi is calm for the first time. A ship that’s been hurled by the storm into harbour. He’s where he wants to be. He is finally inside me, taking full physical possession. Fucking me. He increases his pace, thrusting once, twice more, his pleasure, my pleasure, this wonderful new calmness and belonging, then as the storm crashes over us, over the chalet, battering at the mountain, we come together.

This waltz was the music of the softly falling snow on the regal new buildings of the Ringstrasse. It was the spring tulips covering the lawns and arcades in front of the Schönbrunn Palace. It was the indomitable, majestic peaks of the Alps, the red-cheeked goatherds plucking wild edelweiss from the summits. It was the spirited laughter of Viennese students, wooing and debating in the beer gardens and cafés. It was the stately blue Danube, it was the cathedrals, it was the mountain chalets, and it was the ancient villages sprung up around church bell towers and brooks and streams. It was all of it, and it was all Franz Josef.

O amor é aquele estado em que somos nós próprios com mais satisfação. O amor consiste em deixar aos amados espaço para que sejam eles próprios ao mesmo tempo que se lhes dá a segurança no seio da qual esse eu possa florescer.

It was only in the mid-1970s, after Ted Bundy started abducting and killing middle-class white college girls at schools, shopping malls, ski chalets, national parks and public beaches, that the media suddenly began paying close attention.

Le parecía q algunos lugares en el mundo debían producir felicidad, como una planta propia de un suelo y q no prospera en otra parte, quien pudiera asomarse al balcón de los chalets suizos o encerrar sin tristeza en una casa de campo escocesa!

Chalet, who had finished his ale, left the cup where it was, making no effort to procure more, indicating that he was capable of what the natural philosopher calls "learning behaviour," which turn of phrase pleases us so much that we cannot resist making use of it.

Todo el mundo descubrió temprano que yo había nacido con la ambigua capacidad de engañar, de convencer a la gente sobre cualquier cosa. Y tenían razón. Yo habría sido un gran abogado. El más hijo de puta de todos. El más respetado, el que más culpables ricos habría salvado de la cárcel, el que más inocentes pobres habría metido en prisión. Un gran abogado, sí señor. Una mierda de persona. Hasta tendría un chalet con pileta, un auto grandote. Pero gracias a Dios, para cada oficio espurio hay uno noble. Incluso si tu talento en la tierra es el de mentir. Yo por ejemplo elegí contar cuentos y decir públicamente barbaridades sin importancia. Si mi talento hubiera consistido en correr atrás de una pelota, también tendría una opción correcta y otra incorrecta: mediocampista o árbitro. Y así podríamos seguir toda la tarde: payaso o político, carpintero o banquero, primera dama o puta.

But it was not what I wanted to do! I wanted to star in a silent movie and vamp the sheik, take a trip to the South Seas … walk naked in the sand and surf … write a novel about it. Be the Empress of the Galaxy, be discovered by a hero that would ravish me, and take me away on high adventure! Take a interminable motor home trip across the US and find out how the past had become the present. Journey to Europe, speak flawless French, and become the courtesan in the country chalet where all the real people came to party.” She laughed again. “Mostly I did not want be confined to routine … endless routine.

Rilke’s admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish. As

Why could she not lean on the balcony of a Swiss chalet or confine her sadness in a Scottish cottage, with a husband dressed in a long-skirted coat of black velvet, and sporting soft boots, a pointed hat and ruffled sleeves! Well may it have been her wish to confide all these things to someone. But how to express an indiscernible disquiet, which alters its shape like the clouds, which whirls like the wind? So she could not find the words, the opportunity, the boldness.

Masticando il suo tabacco, il Mezzano ha sputato sulla moquette macchiata e ha detto che questo edificio umido, queste stanze semibuie, non avevano nulla a che vedere con il ritiro per scrittori che si era immaginato: gente che scrive a mano, con lo sguardo che si perde lungo prati verdi on-dulati; scrittori che mangiano pranzi al sacco, ciascuno nel suo chalet privato. Frutteti di albicocchi e nuvole di petali bianchi sollevati dal vento. Sonnellini pomeridiani all'ombra di castagni. Croquet.

Dad and Mom had a lesbian couple living in our chalet for several years in the early 1970s. One was Dad’s secretary, the other Mom’s helper. They shared a room. Fortunately, my parents were hypocritical and acted as if, no matter their official religious absolutes, the higher call was to ignore what the Bible said in favor of what they hoped it meant. Thus, without ever saying it, it seems to me my parents were affirming that the Bible should be read as if Jesus was the only lens through which to see God. The result was that Francis and Edith Schaeffer were nicer than their official theology.

I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life. Such places once abounded. Well into the twentieth century there were many cities comprising multiple communities and languages—often mutually antagonistic, occasionally clashing, but somehow coexisting. Sarajevo was one, Alexandria another. Tangiers, Salonica, Odessa, Beirut, and Istanbul all qualified—as did smaller towns like Chernovitz and Uzhhorod. By the standards of American conformism, New York resembles aspects of these lost cosmopolitan cities: that is why I live here.

He knew how the audition was going to affect their lives for the next ten weeks as she slowly lost her mind from nerves and the strain of trying to scrounge precious practice time from an already jam-packed life. No matter how much time poor Sam gave her, it would never be quite enough, because what she actually needed was for him and the kids to just temporarily not exist. She needed to slip into another dimension where she was a single, childless person. Just between now and the audition. She needed to go to a mountain chalet (somewhere with good acoustics) and live and breathe nothing but music. Go for walks. Meditate. Eat well. Do all those positive-visualization exercises young musicians did these days. She had an awful suspicion that if she were to do this in reality, she might not even miss Sam and the children that much, or if she did miss them, it would be quite bearable.

The first signal of the change in her behavior was Prince Andrew’s stag night when the Princess of Wales and Sarah Ferguson dressed as policewomen in a vain attempt to gatecrash his party. Instead they drank champagne and orange juice at Annabel’s night club before returning to Buckingham Palace where they stopped Andrew’s car at the entrance as he returned home. Technically the impersonation of police officers is a criminal offence, a point not neglected by several censorious Members of Parliament. For a time this boisterous mood reigned supreme within the royal family. When the Duke and Duchess hosted a party at Windsor Castle as a thank you for everyone who had helped organize their wedding, it was Fergie who encouraged everyone to jump, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. There were numerous noisy dinner parties and a disco in the Waterloo Room at Windsor Castle at Christmas. Fergie even encouraged Diana to join her in an impromptu version of the can-can. This was but a rehearsal for their first public performance when the girls, accompanied by their husbands, flew to Klosters for a week-long skiing holiday. On the first day they lined up in front of the cameras for the traditional photo-call. For sheer absurdity this annual spectacle takes some beating as ninety assorted photographers laden with ladders and equipment scramble through the snow for positions. Diana and Sarah took this silliness at face value, staging a cabaret on ice as they indulged in a mock conflict, pushing and shoving each other until Prince Charles announced censoriously: “Come on, come on!” Until then Diana’s skittish sense of humour had only been seen in flashes, invariably clouded by a mask of blushes and wan silences. So it was a surprised group of photographers who chanced across the Princess in a Klosters café that same afternoon. She pointed to the outsize medal on her jacket, joking: “I have awarded it to myself for services to my country because no-one else will.” It was an aside which spoke volumes about her underlying self-doubt. The mood of frivolity continued with pillow fights in their chalet at Wolfgang although it would be wrong to characterize the mood on that holiday as a glorified schoolgirls’ outing. As one royal guest commented: “It was good fun within reason. You have to mind your p’s and q’s when royalty, particularly Prince Charles, is present. It is quite formal and can be rather a strain.

Second Avenue, was now the Fondue Chalet. Why, Siegfried wondered, did not anyone in America understand the wonderful

Cedar Valley It's well offthe beaten path, and that's just how wilderness-lovers like it Nick Nault Photography Island Lake Lodge, about 15 kilometres outside of Fernie, offers in-chalet luxury and pristine mounds of snow as far as the eye can see. Mark Sissons | 878 words They say there are no friends on a powder day. This may be true at most North American ski resorts, where it's every powder hound for himself in the mad morning rush to lay down first tracks after an overnight dump, but not from where I'm standing, perched on a ridgeline overlooking the

You were outside?” I said. “Making reindeer tracks.” I lifted my brows. “Did you hear the kids earlier, talking about reindeer?” Kate had been concerned that the chalet roof was too steep for the reindeer to touch down on, and Logan insisted they didn’t really fly. [...] “So you made reindeer tracks?” I said. “I did. Not on the roof, of course. That wouldn’t work. But they landed in the middle of the yard, then walked over to the house. I figured that should do the trick. I considered adding deer droppings, but Logan would figure out the size differential, so I settled for tracks. Plus a few tufts of deer hair caught in the bushes.” “And you gave our kids flying reindeer.” “I did.” I put my arms around his neck, and wrapped my hands in his damp hair and kissed him. “God, I love you.

Despite the diversity of the constructions that other animals create—the pendulous baskets of oriole nests, the intricate dens of prairie dogs, or the decorated nests of bowerbirds—humans construct the broadest array of dwellings on Earth. Our words for “dwelling” point to this diversity: Palace, hovel, hogan, ranch house, croft. Tipi, chalet, duplex, kraal. Igloo, bungalow, billet, cabin.

Berry and three other old Etonians, James Bolton, Alex Lyle and Christian De Lotbiniere, were the brains behind “Ski Bob” travel. This was a company, named after their Eton housemaster Bob Baird, which had been formed when they discovered that they were too young legally to book holidays themselves. So these young entrepreneurs started their own company and within the twenty-strong group, which mainly compromised old Etonians, the greatest accolade was to be called “Bob.” Diana was soon Bob, Bob, Bobbing along. “You’re skating on thin ice,” she yelled in her Miss Piggy voice as she skied dangerously close behind members of the group. She joined in the pillow fights, charades, and satirical singsongs. Diana was teased mercilessly about a framed photograph of Prince Charles, taken at his Investiture in 1969, which hung in her school dormitory. Not guilty, she said. It was a gift to the school. When she stayed in the Berry chalet she slept on the living-room sofa. Not that she got much sleep. Medical student, James Colthurst, liked to regale the slumbering throng with unwelcome early morning renditions of Martin Luther King’s famous “I had a dream” speech or his equally unamusing Mussolini impersonation.

The snow melted,” wrote Ursula, “and the spring had a fairy tale beauty.” The warmer weather brought a flood of wild daffodils to the hills above the chalet, and no fewer than three spies to the Molehill. Alexander Foote and Len Beurton traveled separately to Switzerland and checked into a Montreux boardinghouse, the Pension Elisabeth, overlooking Bon Port on Lake Geneva. The next day, while the children and Ollo “made their way through a sea of flowers, picking arms full of daffodils,” the three conspirators sat in Ursula’s kitchen and discussed how to murder Hitler. Foote was distinctly alarmed to discover that in the intervening weeks the ambiguous injunction to “keep an eye” on Hitler at the Osteria Bavaria “had

it was all very well being decent when things were smooth; but we often had rough times given us to show what we were. [. . .] Perhaps we are to have it now. If we are, it's up to us to show how we can deal with it. And we shan't do that by wailing over it.

[...] coincé dans le passage d'une vie à une autre, incapable de renoncer à l'une ou de m'engager dans l'autre, paralysé par le désir même du changement, cloué pour ainsi dire au seuil du possible.

[...] que nous ne sommes pas seuls à être seuls, que nous sommes ensemble à être tout ce qui est [...]

J'aime penser que les êtres ainsi immobiles et poreux sont la respiration du monde [...]. C'est à travers eux que le monde voyage, que la vie circule, sans eux le monde suffoque et se déchire à l'intérieur de frontières érigées par la peur de mourir.

I’ve never been skiing before. It’s not something you generally get to do when you grow up on a council estate, is it? But since I started at Oxford last year, I’ve got used to keeping quiet about that kind of thing. My vowels have rounded out, I say lunch instead of dinner, dinner instead of tea and try to remember not to say toilet. I didn’t do it deliberately, it just happened.

Thing is, I can see Adam’s an arse in many ways, and he spends almost the whole time when we’re together trying to wind me up, but he’s also my brother, whether I like it or not. Always has been, always will be. There’s a bond there. It’s maybe difficult to understand if you don’t have a sibling. Even when I hate him, which quite often I do, I know that . . . well, deep down, I don’t hate him really.

We lay in the tent at the edge of Lyme Regis, on a patch of grass between the lobster pots and the chalets, and let death in.

It seems there are some problems even Prosecco and cake can't make better.

In his “year of doubt”—as Mom always called it—Dad had spent the better parts of several months pacing in our old Champéry chalet’s hayloft. He was considering giving up his faith. Things no longer made sense to him. Somehow he convinced himself to still believe. And in 1949 (at about the same time Dad was pacing), Billy Graham was also suffering from doubts and had a similar re-conversion. Billy walked into the woods, laid his Bible on a tree stump, and prayed for more faith. Suddenly he just knew it was all true! To an outside observer, these self-fulfilling miracles of renewed faith might be open to question; they might even seem to have something to do with the fact that Dad and Billy, and many others, had a vested interested in their belief, belief through which they found meaning, the respect of others, and also earned a living. But since Billy mentioned to Dad—at least half a dozen times over thirty or so years of knowing each other—that he was terrified of dying, maybe Billy’s moment of sublime revelation hadn’t quite done the trick. As for Dad, his temper and violent rage at my mother lessened with time but only disappeared altogether when he was dying of cancer. God might have given Dad faith, but he never did manage to get him to be polite to his wife. Flimsily

Emerging from the next chalet in the row was a young woman, probably mid-twenties he guessed, about medium height and build, with dark brown bobbed hair. She was clutching an arm full of books and a cup of coffee. That he had taken all this in, in a single glance, was remarkable. As he had simultaneously taken the fact, she was absolutely naked… “Good morning Miss!” “Miss? I never call anyone Miss! She could be married! A radical feminist! And I have just insulted her! I should have said Mizz, or Mam’, Oh God!” The thoughts raced through Addy’s panic-stricken mind. “There has been a spot of trouble at the clubhouse.” Professional, act professional. “I am making a few enquiries, I’d like to come back and ask you a few questions when …” Professional, you’re a professional, Man up! “… When you have … got yourself sorted out.” Phew!!

Her Grace is coming to High Scape,” Karish said quietly. I scraped some soap from the bar into the sink. “Who?” “The Dowager Duchess of Westsea.” I hesitated a moment. His mother. “Well, it’s been a good while since you’ve seen her.” I handed him a soapy dish. He snorted. “I’ve gone a good seventeen years without seeing her.” What could I say to that? “Oh.” “Apparently she had been on some kind of retreat in the country—” “Flown Raven is the country,” I muttered. “City slave,” he said. “Farm boy,” I shot back. “I’ve never even seen a farm.” “Don’t trifle me with details.” “Anyway,” he continued, but he looked a little less grim, which had been the point of the interruption. “The gossip failed to catch up with her at the rustic chalet where she was meditating or whatever,” he sneered at the word ‘meditating, ’ “and she only recently learned that I had abjured the title.” “Ah.” I could see where this was going. “Displeased, was she?” The sound he made might have been a breathy laugh. “Furious. Enraged. Maddened. I fear for the life of the poor servant who handed the letter to her.” He opened a cabinet—the correct one, as it happened—and placed the dish inside.

[La « bécosse » a] bien des avantages. L’avantage de la « bécosse », c’est qu’elle fonctionne à sec contrairement à nos cabinets d’aisances grand confort qui évacuent de trois à cinq gallons d’eaux polluées à chaque usage, des eaux qu’il nous faut ensuite épurer par le biais de coûteuses installations septiques. Au Québec, le Règlement sur l’évacuation et le traitement des eaux usées des résidences isolées considère la « bécosse » comme une alternative valable pour les camps de chasse et de pêche et tout chalet sans eau courante, pour ceux qui aiment se retrouver dans un véritable milieu sauvage. Elle peut avantageusement remplacer l’installation septique avec élément épurateur classique ou modifié. Et sa mauvaise réputation ? Cette réputation lui vient du fait que la plupart des « bécosses » que nous avons connues dégageaient de mauvaises odeurs et n’étaient pas très accueillantes. Or, un cabinet à fosse sèche bien construit, selon les normes du Règlement, ne dégage pas d’odeurs et peut facilement être gardé propre comme un sou neuf. Pour qu’il en soit ainsi, il est essentiel que la fosse soit creusée dans un sol sec, perméable et bien drainé. Voilà tout le secret d’une bonne « bécosse ». La décomposition des matières fécales doit obligatoirement se faire à l’air libre, dans un milieu sec. Les odeurs de putréfaction se produisent inévitablement quand l’eau s’infiltre à l’intérieur de la fosse ou quand celle-ci a été creusée dans un endroit où le niveau de la nappe d’eau souterraine est élevé. L’eau est l’ennemi public n° 1 des « bécosses ».

[La « bécosse » a] bien des avantages. L’avantage de la « bécosse », c’est qu’elle fonctionne à sec contrairement à nos cabinets d’aisances grand confort qui évacuent de trois à cinq gallons d’eaux polluées à chaque usage, des eaux qu’il nous faut ensuite épurer par le biais de coûteuses installations septiques. Au Québec, le Règlement sur l’évacuation et le traitement des eaux usées des résidences isolées considère la « bécosse » comme une alternative valable pour les camps de chasse et de pêche et tout chalet sans eau courante, pour ceux qui aiment se retrouver dans un véritable milieu sauvage. Elle peut avantageusement remplacer l’installation septique avec élément épurateur classique ou modifié. Et sa mauvaise réputation ? Cette réputation lui vient du fait que la plupart des « bécosses » que nous avons connues dégageaient de mauvaises odeurs et n’étaient pas très accueillantes. Or, un cabinet à fosse sèche bien construit, selon les normes du Règlement, ne dégage pas d’odeurs et peut facilement être gardé propre comme un sou neuf. Pour qu’il en soit ainsi, il est essentiel que la fosse soit creusée dans un sol sec, perméable et bien drainé. Voilà tout le secret d’une bonne « bécosse ». La décomposition des matières fécales doit obligatoirement se faire à l’air libre, dans un milieu sec. Les odeurs de putréfaction se produisent inévitablement quand l’eau s’infiltre à l’intérieur de la fosse ou quand celle-ci a été creusée dans un endroit où le niveau de la nappe d’eau souterraine est élevé. L’eau est l’ennemi public n° 1 des « bécosses ».

McClury folded back the rifle’s bipod and stood, disturbing the light covering of snow that lay across his body. His weapon was an Accuracy International L96, a bolt-action rifle made by the Brits. In McClury’s opinion one of the best all-round rifles in the world for this type of work. Precise and powerful but not too big or heavy. He’d used enough of them in the past to qualify his opinion. He wore white Gore-Tex pants, a jacket with a hood, and a white ski mask. The rifle’s furniture had been wrapped in strips of white electrical tape. McClury unbuttoned and unzipped the jacket and threw it off. It was camouflage and protection against the cold but impeded movement. Underneath he wore a black thermal shirt. He felt the chill immediately, but for now he could live with it. He left the white ski mask in place. His hide was a little under five hundred yards away, overlooking the target’s chalet. McClury had been set up just under the crest of a snowy outcrop dotted with trees to hide his silhouette and to make him virtually invisible.

Slaton moved closer and reached a hand under the waist of her unzipped jacket. To anyone watching, they would appear as lovers engaged in a parting embrace. Astrid tensed visibly as his hand curled around her beltline and found the gun. He’d made her take it when they left the chalet—that X-ray image he could never have explained. He discreetly pulled the Glock clear and slid it under his own jacket. “I might need this.” She pulled back and smiled nervously. “One hour,” he repeated. She nodded and turned away, crunching over a sidewalk paved in clouded ice. Astrid turned a corner and disappeared

Francisco was an underdog city struggling to absorb an influx of aspiring alphas. It had long been a haven for hippies and queers, artists and activists, Burners and leather daddies, the disenfranchised and the weird. It also had a historically corrupt government, and a housing market built atop racist urban-renewal policies—real estate values had benefited as much from redlining as from discriminatory zoning practices and midcentury internment camps—but these narratives, along with the reality that an entire generation had been prematurely lost to AIDS, undercut its reputation as a mecca for the free and freakish, people on the fringe. The city, trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not quite caught up to the newfound momentum of tech’s dark triad: capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity. It was a strange place for young and moneyed futurists. In the absence of vibrant cultural institutions, the pleasure center of the industry might have just been exercise: people courted the sublime on trail runs and day hikes, glamped in Marin and rented chalets in Tahoe. They dressed for work as if embarking on an alpine expedition: high-performance down jackets and foul-weather shells, backpacks with decorative carabiners. They looked ready to gather kindling and build a lean-to, not make sales calls and open pull-requests from climate-controlled open-plan offices. They looked in costume to LARP their weekend selves.

One day, meandering through the bookcases, I had picked up his diaries and begun to read the account of his famous meeting with Hitler prior to Munich, at the house in Berchtesgaden high up in the Bavarian mountains. Chamberlain described how, after greeting him, Hitler took him up to the top of the chalet. There was a room, bare except for three plain wooden chairs, one for each of them and the interpreter. He recounts how Hitler alternated between reason – complaining of the Versailles Treaty and its injustice – and angry ranting, almost screaming about the Czechs, the Poles, the Jews, the enemies of Germany. Chamberlain came away convinced that he had met a madman, someone who had real capacity to do evil. This is what intrigued me. We are taught that Chamberlain was a dupe; a fool, taken in by Hitler’s charm. He wasn’t. He was entirely alive to his badness. I tried to imagine being him, thinking like him. He knows this man is wicked; but he cannot know how far it might extend. Provoked, think of the damage he will do. So, instead of provoking him, contain him. Germany will come to its senses, time will move on and, with luck, so will Herr Hitler. Seen in this way, Munich was not the product of a leader gulled, but of a leader looking for a tactic to postpone, to push back in time, in hope of circumstances changing. Above all, it was the product of a leader with a paramount and overwhelming desire to avoid the blood, mourning and misery of war. Probably after Munich, the relief was too great, and hubristically, he allowed it to be a moment that seemed strategic not tactical. But easy to do. As Chamberlain wound his way back from the airport after signing the Munich Agreement – the fateful paper brandished and (little did he realise) his place in history with it – crowds lined the street to welcome him as a hero. That night in Downing Street, in the era long before the security gates arrived and people could still go up and down as they pleased, the crowds thronged outside the window of Number 10, shouting his name, cheering him, until he was forced in the early hours of the morning to go out and speak to them in order that they disperse. Chamberlain was a good man, driven by good motives. So what was the error? The mistake was in not recognising the fundamental question. And here is the difficulty of leadership: first you have to be able to identify that fundamental question. That sounds daft – surely it is obvious; but analyse the situation for a moment and it isn’t. You might think the question was: can Hitler be contained? That’s what Chamberlain thought. And, on balance, he thought he could. And rationally, Chamberlain should have been right. Hitler had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. He was supreme in Germany. Why not be satisfied? How crazy to step over the line and make war inevitable.

One day, meandering through the bookcases, I had picked up his diaries and begun to read the account of his famous meeting with Hitler prior to Munich, at the house in Berchtesgaden high up in the Bavarian mountains. Chamberlain described how, after greeting him, Hitler took him up to the top of the chalet. There was a room, bare except for three plain wooden chairs, one for each of them and the interpreter. He recounts how Hitler alternated between reason – complaining of the Versailles Treaty and its injustice – and angry ranting, almost screaming about the Czechs, the Poles, the Jews, the enemies of Germany. Chamberlain came away convinced that he had met a madman, someone who had real capacity to do evil. This is what intrigued me. We are taught that Chamberlain was a dupe; a fool, taken in by Hitler’s charm. He wasn’t. He was entirely alive to his badness. I tried to imagine being him, thinking like him. He knows this man is wicked; but he cannot know how far it might extend. Provoked, think of the damage he will do. So, instead of provoking him, contain him. Germany will come to its senses, time will move on and, with luck, so will Herr Hitler. Seen in this way, Munich was not the product of a leader gulled, but of a leader looking for a tactic to postpone, to push back in time, in hope of circumstances changing. Above all, it was the product of a leader with a paramount and overwhelming desire to avoid the blood, mourning and misery of war. Probably after Munich, the relief was too great, and hubristically, he allowed it to be a moment that seemed strategic not tactical. But easy to do. As Chamberlain wound his way back from the airport after signing the Munich Agreement – the fateful paper brandished and (little did he realise) his place in history with it – crowds lined the street to welcome him as a hero. That night in Downing Street, in the era long before the security gates arrived and people could still go up and down as they pleased, the crowds thronged outside the window of Number 10, shouting his name, cheering him, until he was forced in the early hours of the morning to go out and speak to them in order that they disperse. Chamberlain was a good man, driven by good motives. So what was the error? The mistake was in not recognising the fundamental question. And here is the difficulty of leadership: first you have to be able to identify that fundamental question. That sounds daft – surely it is obvious; but analyse the situation for a moment and it isn’t. You might think the question was: can Hitler be contained? That’s what Chamberlain thought. And, on balance, he thought he could. And rationally, Chamberlain should have been right. Hitler had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia. He was supreme in Germany. Why not be satisfied? How crazy to step over the line and make war inevitable. But that wasn’t the fundamental question. The fundamental question was: does fascism represent a force that is so strong and rooted that it has to be uprooted and destroyed? Put like that, the confrontation was indeed inevitable. The only consequential question was when and how. In other words, Chamberlain took a narrow and segmented view – Hitler was a leader, Germany a country, 1938 a moment in time: could he be contained? Actually, Hitler was the product

Now she has headed back up toward the Chalet. Has her father signaled her in some way? I don’t see any sign of him. He never seems to pay any attention to her nor tries to know where she is. Polly found his behavior negligent, but perhaps Nan is—in general—better off for it. Not every parent pays attention in a way that is to the child’s benefit.

Either way, you should get out of that house.” “I did. I’m at the Sleep Chalet on Route 9.” “Sounds swanky.” “If the swank were onomatopoeic, then it would be,” Luna said.

Camping viert 70 jarig jubileum met stacaravan en Chalets.

He never felt this way about any of his previous jobs: dishwasher at a suburban Chinese restaurant, delivery driver for Swiss Chalet, janitor at a bank. Those jobs did not carry the respect and nobility attached to being an entrepreneur.

A veces nos encontrábamos en la cima de una montaña con precipicios a nuestros pies que parecían prontos a tragarnos: era tal su profundidad que nuestra mirada no podía sondearla. Otras, era un pueblecito encantador con sus graciosos chalets y su campanario sobre el cual se balanceaban suavemente algunas nubes resplandecientes de blancura. Más lejos, un vasto lago, dorado por los últimos rayos de sol y cuyas ondas serenas y puras reflejaba el azul del cielo y del fuego del poniente, presentaba a nuestros ojos maravillados el más poético y encantador espectáculo que se pueda imaginar. Al fondo del vasto horizonte se veían las montañas cuyos contornos imprecisos hubieran escapado a nuestra vista si sus cumbres nevadas brillando al sol no hubieran venido a añadir un encanto más al hermoso lago que nos cautivaba.

She tells of an emotionally powerful event in her life: “sitting in a hospital waiting room after the sudden death of a dear friend. Everything about that time was surreal, of course, with people coming and going, some of them familiar–her family members and some of our mutual friends–and others who were complete strangers. These were the ones who confused me. Didn’t they know that I was the number one friend, the one who knew Ginny the best? But here they were, unaware of me and just as stricken by shock and loss. All those people know different sides of my adventurous friend.. They had climbed rock walls or hiked the Rocky Mountains with her, sat in her writing classes, or taught with her at different times in her life. My friend Ginny was the writer and hiker, the scholar with the ironic sense of humor. I had written books and organized conferences with her, chatted for hours over cups of coffee and plates of Indian food. Their friend was someone else entirely, the Ginny who spent the summer in a chalet high up in the Alps reading French novels or Ginny the neighborhood mom. And unless I was prepared to share my friend with other people, I would never really know her. . . . That experience of the familiar suddenly becoming strange . . . is why we need to know the stories of the past. (p. 48)

Scarlett Mistry supposed there were natural disasters everywhere. But it was all so very inconvenient. When she was a child, her father had gone apoplectic over a hurricane that had flattened one of their multi-million-dollar high-rises in Miami Beach. A landslide in Vail had once collapsed the roof of a Mistry Hotels chalet. And her mother was constantly threatening to sell off the property in New Orleans before the levees gave way for good. Even in her family's native Gujarat, India, there were terrible floods when the monsoons came. Property was a risky way to make a living, in Scarlett's opinion - not that she'd ever say as much to her parents. She'd long ago decided on an alternative route to fame and fortune, one free from the uncertainty of climate change and its unpredictable effect on the real estate market. Unfortunately, she hadn't factored in power outages. So instead of being able to check any of her feeds, she was stuck sitting in a wingback chair, her phone as dead as a brick in her hand, and listening to Orchid pepper the townie with questions about how bad the storm had gotten. He wasn't big on details, that Vaughn Green. Not that Scarlett needed Vaughn's opinion on how screwed they all were. After all, she was spending the afternoon sitting under a quilt by a fire like some sort of pioneer girl.

What would have happened, I wondered, if Clover and Jotter never ran the river—if they had listened to the critics and doomsayers, or to their own doubts? They brought knowledge, energy, and passion to their botanical work, but also a new perspective. Before them, men had gone down the Colorado to sketch dams, plot railroads, dig gold, and daydream little Swiss chalets stuck up on the cliffs. They saw the river for what it could be, harnessed for human use. Clover and Jotter saw it as it was, a living system made up of flower, leaf, and thorn, lovely in its fierceness, worthy of study for its own sake. They knew every saltbush twig and stickery cactus was, in its own way, as much a marvel as Boulder Dam—shaped to survive against all the odds. In the United States, half of all bachelor’s degrees in science, engineering, and mathematics go to women, yet these women go on to earn only 74 percent of a man’s salary in those fields. A recent study found that it will be another two decades before women and men publish papers at equal rates in the field of botany, a field traditionally welcoming to women. It may take four decades for chemistry, and three centuries for physics. Stereotypes linger of scientists as white-coated, wild-haired men, and they limit the ways in which young people envision their futures. In a famous, oft-replicated study, 70 percent of six-year-old girls, asked to draw a picture of a scientist, draw a woman, but only 25 percent do so at the age of sixteen.

When most people decide to change their lives, they usually know what they want to change them to. They take over a crumbling chalet in the south of France, they retrain as a social worker, they sell all their belongings and become a nun.

When most people decide to change their lives, they usually know what they want to change them to. They take over a crumbling chalet in the south of France, they retrain as a social worker, they sell all their belongings and become a nun. They tend not to talk about things like rent and student loans and health insurance. There’s never a four-part YouTube video about all the things I’ll still somehow have to pay for.

Але задоволення від винагороди, як відомо, швидкоплинне. У замкнутості залізного костюма, холодного й безжального, немає рятівної благодаті. Насолоди жвавого розуму неабияк перебільшені, і як мені це тепер стало очевидним якраз тими, хто не залежить винятково від них. Те саме можна сказати про доброзичливі побажання знайти нефізичну компенсацію фізичної неповноцінності. У цьому напрямі лежить марнота. Втрата — це втрата, і нічого неможливо надбати, даючи їй втішніші імена. Мої ночі захопливі; але я міг би без них обійтися.

Але задоволення від винагороди, як відомо, швидкоплинне. У замкнутості залізного костюма, холодного й безжального, немає рятівної благодаті. Насолоди жвавого розуму неабияк перебільшені, і як мені це тепер стало очевидним якраз тими, хто не залежить винятково від них. Те саме можна сказати про доброзичливі побажання знайти нефізичну компенсацію фізичної неповноцінності. У цьому напрямі лежить марнота. Втрата — це втрата, і нічого неможливо надбати, даючи їй втішніші імена. Мої ночі захопливі; але я міг би без них обійтися.

міг би впоратися краще за таких обставин? Відповідь, безперечно - «найкращий я», і аж диво бере, наскільки часто ми вимагаємо від себе перетворення на кращого себе, добре знаючи, наскільки складно було ді статися туди, де ми є. Цей конкретний Фокус нашої свідомості не викликає у мене зневаги. Однак він чинить ніч відкритою до ризиків темряви; цього моменту не можна недооцінювати. Альпійського дідуся, який зиркає на кожного заброду з-під насуплених брів, не назвеш щасливим чоловіком: його понурість розсіюється часом завдяки ночам, коли він заповнює шафи та скрині, полиці й коридори побічними продуктами відновленої пам'яті.

maturity gave him perspective to see that the moments they shared wouldn’t last forever.

The birch trees around the chalet which Tommy had rented were weeping rainwater. Ferocious midges danced in and out of the raindrops.

Yet he’d done it, he’d said the three little words that could never be unsaid. I love you. Oh God, how could they possibly work together now when even staring out at him now in the chalet’s garden made her heart ache?

Earthwatch Institute offers an opportunity to join research scientists around the globe, assisting with field studies and research. Most programs involve wildlife—for example, you can help track bottlenose dolphins off the Mediterranean coast of Greece (8 days, $2,350), or work with Kenya’s Samburu people to preserve the endangered Grevy’s zebra (13 days, $2,950)—but some are cultural: A program in Bordeaux, France, for instance, has volunteers working in vineyards helping to test and improve wine-growing practices (5 days, $3,395); accommodations are in a chalet and meals are prepared by a French chef. Prices do not include airfare, but can be considered tax-deductible contributions. Earthwatch Institute–U.S., 114 Western Ave., Boston, MA 02134, 800-776-0188 or 978-461-0081, www.earthwatch.org. For many volunteers, their favorite program is Sierran Footsteps. Volunteers spend four days with the Me-Wuk Indians in central California’s Stanislaus National Forest harvesting reeds and then making baskets. They also learn Indian legends and cook traditional foods. The project is designed to help keep these Indian traditions alive. It might sound like summer camp, but this program, and all the others, has a serious side.

Do you have a key to this chalet?” She let loose a long sigh. “No. But

Cultural Diplomacy—and an Accolade Among Piazzolla’s tasks during his first summer at the Chalet El Casco was the composition of “Le Grand Tango,” a ten-minute piece for cello and piano commissioned by Efraín Paesky, Director of the OAS Division of Arts, and dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich, to whom Piazzolla sent the score. Rostropovich had not heard of Piazzolla at the time and did not look seriously at the music for several years.7 Written in ternary form, the work bears all Piazzolla’s hallmarks: tight construction, strong accents, harmonic tensions, rhythmic complexity and melodic inspiration, all apparent from the fierce cello scrapes at the beginning. Piazzolla uses intervals not frequently visited on the cello fingerboard. Its largely tender mood, notably on display in the cello’s snaking melodic line in the reflective middle section, becomes more profoundly complex in its emotional range toward the end. With its intricate juxtapositions of driving rhythms and heart-rending tags of tune, it is just about the most exciting music Piazzolla ever wrote, a masterpiece. Piazzolla was eager for Rostropovich to play it, but the chance did not come for eight years. Rostropovich, having looked at the music, and “astounded by the great talent of Astor,” decided he would include it in a concert. He made some changes in the cello part and wanted Piazzolla to hear them before he played the piece. Accordingly, in April 1990, he rehearsed it with Argentine pianist Susana Mendelievich in a room at the Teatro Colón, and Piazzolla gently coached the maestro in tango style—”Yes, tan-go, tan-go, tan-go.” The two men took an instant liking to one another.8 It was, says Mendelievich, “as if Rostropovich had played tangos all his life.” “Le Grand Tango” had its world premiere in New Orleans on April 24, 1990. Sarah Wolfensohn was the pianist. Three days later, they both played this piece again at the Gusman Cultural Center in Miami. [NOTE C] Rostropovich performed “Le Grand Tango” at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, in July 1994; the pianist was Lambert Orkis. More recently, cellist Yo-Yo Ma has described “Le Grand Tango” as one of his “favorite pieces of music,” praising its “inextricable rhythmic sense...total freedom, passion, ecstasy.

To give just one example of what the inside of this world (largely upper-class and Oxbridge world of wealth, power, and privilege) looked like: Huxley sent the UNESCO documents to his close friend the English poet Stephen Spender. In his reply, from his regular retreat at the Chalet Waldegg in Gstaad, Switzerland, Spender says that he won't burden Huxley with his own views on human rights, since he doesn't have anything 'worth saying' on the topic, but then goes on to suggest that Huxley send the documents to some of his acquaintances. This curious list of the great and the good includes the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, the first and second president of Czechoslovakia, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer, and W.H. Auden. Spender even gives Huxley some advice about whom to avoid: 'I honestly don't think there are any outstanding Belgians.

A city is different things to us at different times - of the day, of the year, of our life. Many years have passed since I was in the backseat of the car, taken with the razzle-dazzle. Today, I'm more drawn to the neighborhood coffee shops, or modest old parks like Abingdon Square in Greenwich Village, where farmers come to sell cheese and eggs under the London Plane trees. I have a soft spot for the little urban island like McCarthy Square, with its birdhouses - some with simple peak roofs; others with multiple stories and decks, made of miniature wood logs, like ski chalets - that poke out from shrubs and evergreens. I like the quiet of the West Village in the morning, where sidewalk chalkboards outside restaurants and coffee shops promise caffeine and better days, and streets paved with setts - Jane, West 12th, Bethune, Bank - feed into Washington Street like streams emptying into a river.

During an interlude of peace in 1802, a consortium of patrons clubbed together to send Turner to Paris, in order to study in the Louvre. To begin with, he embarked on a tour of the Alps, whose sublime beauty and constant climatic change taught the young artist the awesome scale and mutability of nature. The Alpine tour resulted in some spectacular watercolours and oil paintings. Although he never witnessed an avalanche himself, an account of a devastating one in the Grisons prompted Turner to create the following painting in 1810. The tragic event occurred at Selva, killing twenty-five people. The canvas depicts huge rocks, driven before the weight of snow, crashing down upon a small chalet. Turner opted to portray not a single human figure, concentrating on the unparalleled might of nature instead.

Two rows of wooden cabins, more than a dozen of them, stretched up the slope behind the hotel. The cabins had pitched roofs, vaguely suggesting ultra-utilitarian Alpine chalets. Only two of them had lights on, one in the middle and the last cabin at the end of the row. The last cabin would be where she was meeting Ghanbari, he thought, parking the Toyota around the side of the hotel, next to another SUV. He checked the windows of the hotel and the other structures before getting out of the Toyota but could see no one watching. It was a shame he didn’t have his night vision goggles, he thought, but bringing them through Iranian customs would have been a dead give-away. The Iranians were all over him as it was. He took out the ZOAF pistol, attached the sound suppressor, put it in his ski jacket pocket and got out of the SUV. The night was cloudy. He couldn’t see the stars. A cold wind filled with tiny snow particles blew down from the peak. He walked through the snow behind the first cabin, then higher up and across the slope behind the cabins so he could approach the last cabin from the rear

But “the market”—like “dialectical materialism”—is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers—mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers—who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.

You will not enter my chalet, I will not open the door for you; you won't put out my fire, you won't knock me down!

I love her freckles. Every single one. Someday, I’m going to take her to a chalet in the mountains and we’ll never leave the bed. I’ll just count all her freckles one at a time while we drink hot chocolate and fuck like gods.