“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.
