Château de Corbiac, Pécharmant, France

First off, the wine. This is a really nice Château to visit. There are a wide variety of wines to taste and the tasting room is set up in a professional manner. The woman who educated us about her family's wines was knowledgable, spoke some English, more than at many places we visited and it was a fun experience to taste the wine and to hear about their hopes and dreams for a bigger audience for their product in the future.

Second is the property itself. The Château is in the early phases of deterioration, with almost everything needing a bit of repair,b ut it is still quite beautiful, none-the-less, and the views are spectacular. Not that it would be encouraged but you really could spend half a day soaking up the atmosphere.

Then there is the legend. Our wine server links herself with Cyrano de Bergerac, not the one that Edmond Rosemund depicts, but rather the man whom the character is based on. He was apparently not from Bergerac, nor is it altogether clear why he was known for Bergerac, but as she tells it, this was his place and she is related to him. If you are in the neighborhood you must stop by.

Gilgamesh, Translated by Stephen Mitchell (2150 BCE)

Through the pandemic, there has been an online version of The Community Reads that has been interesting to mostly observe to date, because as a health care worker in charge of other health care workers I was crazy busy at the front end of all this.  Now I have changed jobs in the hopes of having less stress and I feel like my evenings could be populated more by reading.  That hasn't been wildly successful yet, but it has only been a week, and I did get to truly focus on this book, which was a ten day read, a couple of days before it was over.

Gilgamesh is not just amazing as a story (I will get to that), but also as a window into the Summerian city state of Uruk, which is in the demolished country of Syria, dating back 5000 years.  The story is told in cuneiform, which is the earliest known written language.  It is a dizzying assortment of lines and dots, which are not words but letters and numbers.

Gilgamesh is a flood story, and notable in that it is the earliest known flood story.  He is also a flawed hero, and he does not act alone.  The beauty. of this "translation" is that it really isn't so much of a word for word rendition of the original text, but rather the retelling of a fable.  The introduction tells you all that you need to know.  It introduces the characters, and then the challenges that they face and finally what happens along the way.

I have known about and studied this story on a number of occasions in the past, and this is certainly the most enjoyable version.