How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

As we sat at dinner last night with our neighbors, L. the chef and her boyfriend the guitarist, I wondered how to describe the scene in such a way to convey this golden age in all its luxury. To make one long to taste the salad with endive and blood oranges - oh, the food we have on our tables from all the corners of this round earth - to make one yearn to sit on wooden chairs of perfect white geometry and the thinnest of stainless steel, surrounded by candles burning in old rusting filigree cages from Marrakesh. To make one wish to converse effortlessly about God and war and hating to wash the dishes. What it is to sate a refined palate with a refined palette in a candlelit apartment above a narrow street on one of the islands that make up the city of Stockholm.

It all feels so everyday, and yet we are impossibly, embarrassingly rich.

Will all this sound as romantic to someone born today as Gertrude Stein's descriptions of buying food in Paris during the '20s sounds to me?

The Swedish word for the day is svartsjuk. It means jealous.

- by Francis S.