" And my dream is to recapture the art of loving and of being seduced; the habit of the stroll and of reading in cafes; the practice, endorsed by Dante and Baudelaire, of building, repairing, and living in cities; the exhilaration of a speech (at their purest depths, the languages of Europe have never been anything other than this) that no sooner encounters the desert than it discovers the delight of filling it with song; the taste for a beautiful "now" that, when it offers itself for the taking, is an almost perfect treasure, as the grasshopper might have replied to the ant in the fable; in sum, the art and the inclination that were the voice, the flavour, and the colour of Europe. "

― Bernard-Henri Lévy , The Empire and the Five Kings: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World