Our last day in Paris.
We set out in similar configurations to the day before. Gramps and Grams, Anna and Nora headed out to see the La Tour Eiffel, Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile and Notre Dame while Jen, Dietrich, Emily, Charis and I charted a course for a series of public gardens.
Our plan was the walk the route outlined in red below, but we only got as far as the blue arrow before heading back.
On that route, we did duck into the Louvre, where I found a great piece of Hellenistic sculpture and was again struck by the impossibility of conveying an experience of sculpture through two dimensional imagery. The several shots in the slideshow are not meant to be an attempt at conveying such an experience. Rather, they show the impossibility of doing so by interpreting the statute in several different ways.
Exiting the Louvre, we strolled at a leisurely pace through the Jardin des Tuileries, stopping for breaks, sitting in the shade, lying on the grass.
We proceeded along a portion of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, though not as far as the Arc de Triomphe, until we realized we were running out of our allotted time. (Sigh.)
Crossing the Pont Alexandre III bridge to catch the metro at Invalides, we stopped to buy ice cream from a small vendor whose family has been making and selling ice-cream in Paris for four generations. He was impressed with Jen’s French, and we struck up a conversation. When he found out we were from Minnesota, he let us know that he was aware of Wisconsin and the quality of their dairy products! The ice cream was very good. I had pistachio (or rather had some of Jen’s) -- a flavour that took me right back to the old days of homemade ice cream out of mom and dad’s ice cream maker.
After rejoining the other half of the adventurers, we dined again in the Quartier Latin. By now everyone wanted their fair share of escargot when it came time to order.
From dinner, most of us headed for the Jardin du Luxembourg (where Marius first started watching Jean Valjean and Cosette stroll), but we arrived with only time for a brief stroll before the garden closed. Still, it was enough to have the constant thought of returning to Paris lodged in the back of my mind.
As the gardens were closing, we decided to catch a last night view of La Tour Eiffel. It really was a beautiful site to see the tower all lit up, though it really is impossible to photograph from the base and I found myself wishing for a different vantage point but not really wanting to walk far enough to get one.
On our last evening, we made our way home in three separate parties. I got off the RER by myself at St. Michelle-Notre Dame to take one last night look through the camera at the Quartier Latin. It was later at night and the scene was enough to confirm the sadness of some aspects of Paris culture. In all fairness, I suppose this sadness marks the excessies of “night life” wherever you find it, but somehow it seemed more sad, more threadbare here.
What a beautiful, tragic, robustly human, flawed place full of the history of all that is important to the history of the West and, who knows, perhaps even to a bit of our future as a human race.
Day 09 Reflections: Last Thoughts on Paris
Reflection One: The gardens of Paris remain for me the place I would gladly be stranded in.
Reflection Two: This was the first time I experienced the distinct “urbanism” that is at least partly the model for what city planners and architects refer to as “new urbanism.”
In Paris, it works. I value the pattern of life that is created by the cafés, the neighborhoods, the parks, the playgrounds, the small scale retail and groceries. It works, and it seems to generate a kind of genuine sense of neighborhood life and community that is difficulty to find in the United States outside of small towns.
However, I do wonder if planning for such a life can work in the United States. Does it work in Paris only because it emerged naturally in Paris and was not planned by those who had a proactive vision to implement? Would the psyche of Americans be able to leave the back yard, the personal garden, the car, the notion that every man’s home is his castle? These are not compatible with the spirit of Paris neighborhoods.
Similarly, the kind of leisure culture that exists in Paris and thrives in this neighborhood configuration requires a mindset that is foreign to the United States and to Americans. There are economic and social trade offs that we may not be willing to make to achieve a more leisurely pace of life, a pace in which dancing by the river on a Monday night would make sense.
For good and ill, we do rate productivity, efficiency and value as higher than leisure, quality of life and culture.
Can we change?
Could we?
If so, under what conditions?
Reflection Three: Yes, there is a tension between the Paris way of being and the traditional, conservative, American Christian way of being.
It is a deep tension between two elements that have been torn apart in us since the fall. But I now know better, more concretely, more personally what to anticipate in the marriage of heaven and earth, when not only this division of spirit but also a thousand more will be forever healed.
Reflection Four: This week in Paris was the first time I experienced how deeply travel can be an education. To really be in a foreign place gives rise to a different sort of questions than any book can generate.
Yet all my education to this point had also paved a way for such experience. If I had never read Les Miserables, I would not have experienced this city as I have. If I had not previously studied the stained glass of Sainte-Chapelle I would have not had time to be enraged at the Tribunal de Grande Instance. If I had not studied New Urbanism I wouldn’t have known to look for the old urbanism. Had I not been reading Romano Guardini I would not have had him as a travelling companion and fellow seer.
Film studies, art history, literature, photography, previous reflection and dozens of other intellectual endeavors in the course of my forty years had all prepared me for an experience of Paris that has broken open new avenues for inquiry, exposed vistas I had never seen and renewed my sense of the mystery of our role in God’s great project.
Reflection Five:
“On Paris”
Here in the shadow
of her cathedrals and kings
the quai dwellers dance and cling
to cliffs of their own making,
spinning and whirling,
webs and dust,
beautiful Seine.Click below to watch the slideshow or double click for more options. If you cannot navigate the slideshow, click here to go directly to the album.
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