For some people, retiring is an opportunity to revisit forsaken interests, explore new ones, take stock of the world and its many wonders. A few feel the urge to write, to their peers or to the younger generation, about what they find important and perennial, most often answering questions that nobody has asked them. French-born, JPE has gradually seen his grown children and close family members move to the United States and acknowledges that the irresistible power of America's culture will gradually make France a distant concept for them. When the time came to communicate some of his life lessons, his deeper reflections on various subjects, he chose to do it in the English language. However, he remains totally faithful to his idiosyncratic self and his original French intellectual heritage. JPE has enjoyed a long-lasting marriage of more than 45 years with an accomplished American woman, herself a writer, teacher and translator. After a busy professional life in Paris, they now divide their time between the rural south of France and the West Coast of the United States.