marksouthbend's insane travels

Paris in one night
We got on a train to Paris last night as a means to get to Brussels, Belgium the next day. Paris is stunning. It's not really a "means" to anything. When you see this much beauty all around you, you know you've reached an "end". Exiting St. Lazare train station, we found ourselves in a maze. I don't say "maze" in an attempt to describe big-city bustle. It really is like a maze--the city blocks are made up of solid rows of buildings, all connected to each other without space between, and all roughly the same height (about 5 or 6 stories). We walked 5 or 7 blocks South, and all the way street level remained the bottom of a trench and the buildings were solid walls around us on all sides.

It took us less than an hour to find magic in Paris: sublime, mind-altering art. We heard most of Faure's Requiem, one of my favorites, in Le Eglise de Madelein, a church that shocked me with its grandeur. There are a lot of churches out there that try to be big. Or at least a lot of them point to the sky with their steeples, trying to direct your attention heavenward. Le Eglise de Madelein was actually, literally big enough for God. If I was God, I'd live there. I'm not trying to be casually sacrilegious. Another way to put it would be that it was probably man's best architectural attempt, that I've seen, to boggle the mind and pay tribute to God's power. And Faure's Requiem is as good a musical attempt as I've heard to make human life and death sacred and meaningful. Listening to the music, in that space, made me think "culture makes human beings everything that we want them to be. When I die, I want trumpets, then peace and beauty."

After the music, we continued pushing South, until some space opened up and we saw the Eiffel Tower proudly lit in th distance. We made a show of trying to decide what to do next, but I'm glad we all arrived at what my heart was begging me to do--go closer to that tower, stand under it, find out more about it than you could ever know from pictures or seeing it at a distance. We drew heavily on our limited supply of strength and energy to get ourselves to the tower, which was impressive and satisfying. But at 1 o'clock in the morning, we're still standing under it, without a place to sleep. We started talking about what to do, and we just kept on talking about what to do, because everything we came up with seemed to involve some unappealing exertion. As we talked, we one at a time slumped down beside an ice cream vender hut. It felt good to sit down, still directly under the tower. "Could we camp anywhere nearby, like the parks on either side of the tower? No way, this is a national monument guarded by soldiers patroling with machine guns. Sure is comfortable here, though. Wonder when they'll make us move. Well, should we get up and get a taxi? Eh, let's wait until they make us." And then we just kept on getting more and more comfortable. We all closed our eyes for longer than just a blink at one time or another. Johnny took out his sleeping bag and covered up. All of us followed suit. One at a time we each took a walk to urinate, and settled into our seats that much more comfortably when we returned. After I was away, I came back to find Johnny's sleeping pad laid lengthwise for me to share. This is getting exciting, because we're getting pretty obviously settled in, and the French army keeps on passing us by without saying a word.

We slept under the Eiffel Tower. Not near it. Under. And an elite battalion of the French Army kept watch over us through the night.

And I'm writing this in the top floor of the Louvre, in a corner beside a painting entitled "Orphee descendu aux Enfers pour demander Eurydice au La Musique." Which I know means in English "Every woman in this painting Simultaneously pulls Down her Top."

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