The phone rings incessantly, and James, never losing his aplomb, dashes to answer it between lifting lids and turning, in his faded blue dress shirt and undersized, black owl glasses, to share a morsel of gossip or a 辫别苍蝉茅别 about his latest book, a collection of photographs titled, simply, Paris.

鈥淟ife is a hospital where each patient is driven by the desire to change beds.鈥� Such a 辫别苍蝉茅别 fits with the French moralist tradition of Montaigne, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, yet Baudelaire always regarded Edgar Allan Poe, whom he translated, as his spiritual brother.

For those cultures that do osculate, however, kissing conveys additional hidden messages.

Few things are more enjoyable than a good kiss, but I’d turn down any offer to osculate.

We were bounded only by the Earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls. Our little terraqueous globe is the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds. We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; are we to venture out into space?

In his fantastical narrative The Man in the Moon (1638), the author and divine Francis Godwin has his hero fly to the moon in a machine harnessed to a flock of wild swans. As he ascends into space, the world鈥檚 landmasses diminish, not just in size but in significance .鈥� Godwin grasped that from space Earth would look terraqueous, and far more aqua than terra.