While life escapes slowly from a body, yet remains entire to the end—to what end?—,I think of poppies and grass. The background screen to my text editor on this machine has the coquelicots field by Monet (Coquelicots près d’Argenteuil, 1873, Musée d’Orsay), and I’m looking at it in a different light.

The color contrast and especially the tragic miracle of the poppies used to fascinate me. I attach to them my own experience of the bountiful, happy, yet worrying harvesting of wheat fields in the summer, but also the story of the blooming of poppies in the disturbed battlefields of the Somme and Flanders in the first world war. Without forgetting the difficulty of finding them in fields nowadays, at least this past June in Brittany, since crops and techniques have changed so radically. Though thanks to a happy initiative by several local councils, field poppies and other traditional spring and summer flowers are now sown on the sides of the roads near the entrance to villages and towns. Now, I realize the woman and the boy on the right of Monet’s painting emanate from the purple sea of bleuets and pale grass, as do the ones on the left out of the dark trees and lighter grass. Colorful dust to colorful dust.