In the golden age of the so-called “art cinema”, college-aged cineastes and middle-aged professorial types needed only to congregate at the local repertory theatre for a fix of the latest and greatest in international film. They could catch a Bergman-Fellini double feature and wile away the evening in a coffee shop discussing the Christ-figure symbolism or whatever.
We wish Alizée Dufraisse would talk about us the way she talks about a rock face. The French professional climber acknowledges the focus and discipline required on a difficult ascent, but she finds romance where her peers find only challenge and exhilaration.
When the Porsche 917 debuted at the 1970 Le Mans, it quite literally blew away the competition. Housed in an ultra-lightweight (93-pound) chassis, its 12-cylinder engine and state-of-the-art materials made it both the most formidable and most dangerous car on the road.
Carl Sagan could read a cookbook (apple pie recipe?) and it would sound profound. Hearing that inimitable voice recite his own writing, rich with musings on the nature of the cosmos and humanity, one cannot help but well up with wonder and zeal for the awe-inspiring majesty of our universe.
Even in the data-obsessed collective of Type A personalities that is the world of endurance sports, cyclists exist in a league of their own. For many reasons, they are increasingly regarded as finely tuned machines — defined in the aggregate by a collection of numbers that would baffle a non-athlete.
We are in no rush to slow the pace of progress; after all, we stake our livelihoods on the new, the fashionable and the high-tech. Still, there remains a soft spot in our web-hardened, computerized hearts for the simple dignity of a life in nature, and that soft spot melts to mush (get it?!) before stories like that of Balthazar Ushca, the last remaining ice merchant on Ecuador’s Mt.