Weaving a fascinating dialogue between the Old World as represented by Provence and the New World of the postmodern American university, this memoir describes in finely wrought detail a poet and critic of literary postmodernism moving his family to France and experiencing village life. Stories of amazing adjustments to a wildly different world are etched in beautiful prose, reading like a quest novel, a precise travelogue, an intense discourse on the visionary arts, and a rediscovery - if not reinvention - of the self as this contemporary American intellectual finds enlightenment in exile.