“My son told me always to look up when I was in Paris,” our friend’s mother said as we strolled along rue Mouffetard. Good advice. Just around a corner, we came to St. Etienne du Mont with its pediments, high gable, and cupola against blue sky. And later, along Boulevard St Germain, the face of a bewigged aristocrat peered out from between corbels, beneath wrought iron and geraniums.
What is it about looking up? I’m often surprised. Maybe because what I see around me, down at ground level as I walk along, threads its way through my thoughts, making an unnoticed continuity with them. Interrupted when I happen to look up. At the geometry of chimneys and antennas, at graffiti that complements a pattern of ladder rungs and shadow, or sun in the high branches of an old plane tree. In his novel Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut has a painter describe his single stripe of orange on a green background as “a picture of the awareness in every animal.” For a long time I mis-remembered this passage, having rearranged it into a moment when someone is startled into awareness looking at the painting. It’s that kind of startling into sharper seeing that can happen when I look up.
There’s bound to be something interesting. George Clooney’s over-sized image in an advertisement for watches that masks scaffolding on the Louvre. (I don’t like this—the way it reduces public space to commercial space—but I wasn’t consulted.) A bucket of boards swinging its way down from a top-floor renovation. The gilded dome of Invalides. A “shoe tree” in the Jardin des Plantes. The mystery of high windows against a night sky.
That’s the other thing about looking up in Paris. There’s always that breadth of sky, clouds blown in from elsewhere, connecting you, like the Seine flowing through the city, to the wider world.
1950's: Walked by St Etienne du Mont every day on my way to school - Ecole Blaise Pascal which no longer exists. My grandfather usually accompanied me. It would still be dark in the winter mornings. As we walked by the church, my grandfather would tip his hat -a custom of respect, saying hi to God. Once I took by winter hat off too. But he said that girls didn't have to do that. Only men.
ReplyDelete1950's - again. Lots of memories surface with St Etienne du Mont. My aunt, Danuta, and my uncle, Jean, were married there. Also, first communion with what seemed hordes of kids. A pastor, always dressed in a black cassock, who was very strict and carried a wooden "clapper" he would snap when we were supposed to stand, kneel...In one of his lectures he said anyone who divorced would go to hell. Since my mother was divorced I was convinced she would go to hell and that I would never see her again.
ReplyDeleteHi anonymous –
ReplyDeleteWhat stirring memories! When I walk past St. Etienne du Mont now I’ll think of that grandfather and little girl – and of that lovely custom, the little girl ready to honor it, taking off her hat in the cold. (From a feminist point of view, it seems questionable that only men should say hi to God – but I’m going to decide that the grandfather was simply being kind and protective, and not fault him for being part of the age he lived in.) The pastor will be there too, with his snapping clapper. One of the wonderful things about Paris for me is all the layers of time, all the lives, that the old streets remember. Your memories pull some of that richness close. Thanks!