We're taking off for Italy this afternoon, and I don't want this unfinished post to be lost to the ages, so here it is in its current incarnation. I may come back to it later, I may not. Hey, if the great composers can leave unfinished masterworks, surely no one will miss a proper ending to my humble blog post. Enjoy...
I don't believe in ghosts. I think those shows where so-called ghost-hunters and experts in the paranormal sit around and scare each other with flashlights are retarded. For that reason I have been throroughly surprised by the impact that ghosts have had on me since our arrival in Europe.
I've visited 14th century Buddhist temples in Korea, Inca and pre-Inca ruins in Peru, and 1000-year-old Norse settlements in Canada, and each of these sites has offered a powerful testimony to the history they have witnessed. None of them, however, has been so vividly inhabited by figures so familiar as the ones I've encountered here. Since arriving in London I've felt the palimpsest presence of a host of characters whose histories are literally the stuff of legend.
At Westminster Abbey, surrounded on all sides by the tombs and monuments of a millenium's worth of heroes, I felt what must be pretty typical tourist-saturation. It's hard to be as impressed as you feel you should be looking at the tomb of Rudyard Kipling, when William Shakespeare is enshrined across the hall and Geoffrey Chaucer lies just beside. Nevertheless, I was truly awestruck when I laid eyes on St. Edward's Chair, which has been used in the coronation of every English monarch since Edward III in 1308* up to and including the current Queen. Aside from the fact that this 700-year-old artefact is still in use, and the voice of Jeremy Irons in my audioguide, what really imbued the Chair with a life of its own was the graffiti, itself 300 hears old, scratched all over the chair.
Just next door is the considerably smaller and younger Church of St. Margaret. We almost didn't go into this modest chapel in the shadow of the Abbey, but as we sat in our pew watching the sun stream through the stained glass, I could swear I saw the ghost of John Milton seeking God's guidance in the writing of Paradise Lost, or perhaps praying that his sight should last until he acheived his ambition of reading every book ever written. It is in moments like these that I start to believe in ghosts.
Standing on the spot where they executed William Wallace outside the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, looking at the front door of General Wolfe's home in Bath, or ...
Sharing a glass of wine with the spirits of Hemmingway, Sartre and Picasso...
Gazing out the same windows at the views that inspired Rodin and Rilke...
Standing over the earthly remains of Chopin, Modigliani, and Moliere...
These places bear vivid imprints of individuals who accessed something greater than themselves, and by that virtue they hold a privileged position in our world.
*Queen Mary I is the only exception.
2009-10-12
2009-10-11
A Moveable Feast
We set off from our flat at the ungodly hour of 05.00 - when the only other creatures stirring are Croydon foxes (well, a lone, scruffy one at least). Eurostar shuttles us the two hours to Paris (we’re practically neighbours!) with only some intermittent high-speed-train-ear-pressure issues to complain of. We arrive in Paris, it’s still morning and we’re armed with an ambitious itinerary to make the most of our weekend. This is why we moved to Europe: to have no more reason than a weekend to explore different countries and cultures in this continent dense with different countries and cultures.
To play up stereo-types, Tom trips on a wine cork on our way out of the train station and people walk by munching on whole baguettes and drinking wine straight from the bottle (bottle-drinking evidenced more in the evening, so maybe not representational... however, the dépanneur clerks did have corkscrews handy at the cash...). The incredible number of smokers has Tom craving a cigarette, but he manages to resist. We’re happy to hear and speak French again, and logic is restored with traffic back on the right – except motorbikes, they drive wherever’s most convenient, including the sidewalk. Crosswalks are just as unsafe as at home. We also make the unexpected discovery that Paris is mostly composed of white dust (geologically, some combination of sand, limestone, plaster “of Paris” and gypsum).
Our first stop is the Arc de Triomphe. This great Napoleonic monument is unfortunately set in a giant, traffic-filled roundabout, but is also, and more interestingly, the focal point of numerous boulevards – another Napoleonic creation. We look towards its modern-day counterpart, the Grande Arche de Défense, before walking to Paris’ most recognizable landmark.
Along the way to the Tour Eiffel (and everywhere else), we pass only low-scale, white stone buildings with French balconies and mansard roofs of the most elaborate composition. We pause at the Jardins du Trocadéro, across the Seine, to take in our first views of the tower. Here we also see the first of many souvenir-mongers selling miniature Eiffel Towers. Strangely, no matter where they are in the city, this is all they sell. It makes you wonder how many of these trifles are in existence; we do not support their proliferation. The Eiffel Tower is a wonder of iron construction dating back to the World’s Fair of 1889 and its antique, inclined elevators look about this old. We decide to leave the daytime ascent to the crazy lines of tour bus-tourists and come back in the evening. Unfortunately, after a long day of walking, the prospect of climbing all those stairs (not wanting to chance the rickety elevators) is less than appealing – next time...
We then wander along the Champs de Mars, metro to our hotel and grab a croissant and a baguette for lunch. The subway here actually uses its full name Métropolitain (unlike its Montreal descendant) and has wonderful turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau entrances.
On to the Panthéon. This church, stripped of its saintly title, Ste-Geneviève, in the post-Revolution, secularisation frenzy, proves to be the most photogenic of our tour. A multi-winding-stairways trip up to the dome offers great views across Paris and within the dome’s stunning interior. The high dome also accommodates a reproduction of Foucault’s 1851 pendulum experiment to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. Down in the dimly lit, eerie crypts, we find the tombs of Marie Curie, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, among others.
We once again cross the Seine to Île de la Cité – site of Paris’ first settlement (300 BC) and the Cathédrale de Notre Dame de Paris. A monstrous line of tourists snakes its way through the courtyard of this gothic masterpiece. The eyes delight in flying buttresses, spires, gargoyles and the countless sculptures of the three arched doorways. The most graphic carvings depict extreme scenes of heaven and hell – decapitated heads boiled in pots and sinners eaten whole by dragons. We will take advantage of the Nuit Blanche activities (yearly, all-nighter event conveniently timed with our visit) to see the church in the evening - hopefully when all the tour buses have gone to bed. Also on the island, we take in the Pont Neuf and the Revolution’s prison and former palace, the Conciergerie.
To stretch our legs a little more, we head over to the Rive Droite. At Rogers’ and Piano’s Centre Pompidou, the courtyard is full of people – crazy and sane alike – congregating in the shadow of the building’s fully displayed innards. We’re amazed that it still looks clean, thirty years on, given the mess of pipes, cables and shafts. We also visit the slightly-out-of-the-way/good-exercise Place des Vosges – the oldest planned square in Paris.
With the effects of the croissant worn off, we seek dinner before 19.00. Uninitiated to the culture of late night dining, we finally find a restaurant that will open its kitchen for us – not a good restaurant, but one with local charm and, more importantly, food.
We return to Notre Dame and experience the beautiful, vaulted ceilings by chandelier and candle-light – each one a parishioner’s prayer. For the Nuit Blanche, there is an ‘installation lumineuse’ that borders on the sacrilegious. The gaudy plexiglas and neon light ‘crystals’ certainly do not ‘illuminate the faith’ as promised, but do result in some funky photo lighting. Thankfully, no tour buses are in sight.
I could not visit Paris without somehow evoking Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Callaghan. The best way to do this was a visit to the Quartier Latin. We have a glass of wine on the sidewalk terrace of the old café haunt of Hemingway, Sartre and Picasso, Les Deux Magots. The extortionate prices were surely never paid by Hemingway in his early and poor years in Paris. Having read Hemingway’s Paris memoirs A Moveable Feast, it seemed an appropriate title for this post: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."
The evening ends with a few other Nuit Blanche stops. We pass by the Jardin du Luxembourg with its giant disco ball suspended from a crane, dubbed the Eiffel Tower’s mistress, promising to return the ‘stars’ to the city. On our way back to the hotel, we happen by the Observatory with its green laser beam penetrating the night sky and a projection of the cosmos choreographed to a selection of Queen.
It is the first Sunday of the month and this means free museums in Paris. The Musée du Louvre is deceivingly quiet when we arrive at opening. By the time we reach the first treasure, the Venus de Milo, the crowds are getting difficult. We take the initiation tour of the Louvre and merely scratch the surface of its offerings: Mona Lisa, Winged Victory of Samothrace, Michaelangelo’s Slave, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People... The museum buildings themselves are a marvel; Tom wants to return again on a mechanic’s creeper to fully appreciate the ceiling decoration. We exit through Pei’s Grande Pyramide to a much more awake Paris.
To arrive at Musée Rodin, we pass by the traditional and Beetlejuice-esque sculptures of Jardins des Tuileries and the Theban obelisk of Place de la Concorde. Musée Rodin is set in the tranquil gardens of Hôtel Biron. At various times, Rodin, Matisse, Rilke and Cocteau lived here. It is a great escape; we eat in their outdoor cafe and spend a few hours contemplating The Thinker, The Gates of Hell, The Kiss and The Burghers of Calais. Rodin’s characteristic oversized hands seem to lend more emotion to these figures. It is a sublime experience and there is the feeling that this is truly a rare place in the world.
As we leave Musée Rodin for our pilgrimage to Cimetière du Père Lachaise, we are blinded by the gold dome of the Hôtel des Invalides. A metro ride later and we are in that vast cemetery home to 800,000 dead and a few local cats. We are here because Tom decided he had to see the final resting place of Chopin and the hands that composed Ballad No 1, Opus 23 in G Minor, even if they are now reduced to dust. On this cool autumn day, dead leaves crackle underfoot and add to this perfectly spooky setting for a (good) horror film. We spend a few hours wandering around the labyrinthine paths and get even more disoriented off the paths trying to find the graves of Moliere, Balzac, Proust, Stein, Wilde, Morrison, and others. I scare myself by peeking into broken tombs and knowing that I am undoubtedly walking on the dead (in my usual approach to cemeteries, I do not tread over the bodies themselves...). The graves are often marked with gothic doorways - hopefully one-way... This is not your typical grassy cemetery; it is all stone and white dust. Built-in planters with often ironically dead plants adorn many of the tombs. Modern visitors pay tacky tributes with plastic flowers. Chopin, luckily, has well-tended live plants.
Two of the most popular graves are those of Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. Having moved to Paris only a few months before his death, Jim Morrison’s body lies beneath a stone reading ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ. This Greek inscription literally means ‘according to his own demon’. Less ominous, Oscar Wilde’s grave is covered in lipstick kisses. These are apparently a tribute to his daring homosexual lifestyle and because he was jailed for love. However, the kisses added while we were there seemed more the result of peer pressure and the novelty of it all.
Our last stop is Montmartre where we’ve given ourselves a few hours to decompress over views of Paris and a relaxing meal. We walk up the steps of the Basilique du Sacré Coeur – reminiscent of our own Oratory. Great views of the city await at the top. We dine at one of those ubiquitous Parisian institutions: the streetside café, post 19.00 (we’ve learned our lesson). A guitarist, accordionist and violinist take turns serenading us. We also have the cultural pleasure of rude wait staff over our steak frites and wine.
We board the Eurostar for our return journey, a paler shade than when we left (recall Paris dust), possibly a few pounds lighter, short on sleep and ready to plan our trip to Italy(!). We better figure out this ‘pacing’ thing if we’re to spend a week there...
To play up stereo-types, Tom trips on a wine cork on our way out of the train station and people walk by munching on whole baguettes and drinking wine straight from the bottle (bottle-drinking evidenced more in the evening, so maybe not representational... however, the dépanneur clerks did have corkscrews handy at the cash...). The incredible number of smokers has Tom craving a cigarette, but he manages to resist. We’re happy to hear and speak French again, and logic is restored with traffic back on the right – except motorbikes, they drive wherever’s most convenient, including the sidewalk. Crosswalks are just as unsafe as at home. We also make the unexpected discovery that Paris is mostly composed of white dust (geologically, some combination of sand, limestone, plaster “of Paris” and gypsum).
Our first stop is the Arc de Triomphe. This great Napoleonic monument is unfortunately set in a giant, traffic-filled roundabout, but is also, and more interestingly, the focal point of numerous boulevards – another Napoleonic creation. We look towards its modern-day counterpart, the Grande Arche de Défense, before walking to Paris’ most recognizable landmark.Along the way to the Tour Eiffel (and everywhere else), we pass only low-scale, white stone buildings with French balconies and mansard roofs of the most elaborate composition. We pause at the Jardins du Trocadéro, across the Seine, to take in our first views of the tower. Here we also see the first of many souvenir-mongers selling miniature Eiffel Towers. Strangely, no matter where they are in the city, this is all they sell. It makes you wonder how many of these trifles are in existence; we do not support their proliferation. The Eiffel Tower is a wonder of iron construction dating back to the World’s Fair of 1889 and its antique, inclined elevators look about this old. We decide to leave the daytime ascent to the crazy lines of tour bus-tourists and come back in the evening. Unfortunately, after a long day of walking, the prospect of climbing all those stairs (not wanting to chance the rickety elevators) is less than appealing – next time...
We then wander along the Champs de Mars, metro to our hotel and grab a croissant and a baguette for lunch. The subway here actually uses its full name Métropolitain (unlike its Montreal descendant) and has wonderful turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau entrances.
On to the Panthéon. This church, stripped of its saintly title, Ste-Geneviève, in the post-Revolution, secularisation frenzy, proves to be the most photogenic of our tour. A multi-winding-stairways trip up to the dome offers great views across Paris and within the dome’s stunning interior. The high dome also accommodates a reproduction of Foucault’s 1851 pendulum experiment to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. Down in the dimly lit, eerie crypts, we find the tombs of Marie Curie, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, among others.
We once again cross the Seine to Île de la Cité – site of Paris’ first settlement (300 BC) and the Cathédrale de Notre Dame de Paris. A monstrous line of tourists snakes its way through the courtyard of this gothic masterpiece. The eyes delight in flying buttresses, spires, gargoyles and the countless sculptures of the three arched doorways. The most graphic carvings depict extreme scenes of heaven and hell – decapitated heads boiled in pots and sinners eaten whole by dragons. We will take advantage of the Nuit Blanche activities (yearly, all-nighter event conveniently timed with our visit) to see the church in the evening - hopefully when all the tour buses have gone to bed. Also on the island, we take in the Pont Neuf and the Revolution’s prison and former palace, the Conciergerie.
To stretch our legs a little more, we head over to the Rive Droite. At Rogers’ and Piano’s Centre Pompidou, the courtyard is full of people – crazy and sane alike – congregating in the shadow of the building’s fully displayed innards. We’re amazed that it still looks clean, thirty years on, given the mess of pipes, cables and shafts. We also visit the slightly-out-of-the-way/good-exercise Place des Vosges – the oldest planned square in Paris.With the effects of the croissant worn off, we seek dinner before 19.00. Uninitiated to the culture of late night dining, we finally find a restaurant that will open its kitchen for us – not a good restaurant, but one with local charm and, more importantly, food.
We return to Notre Dame and experience the beautiful, vaulted ceilings by chandelier and candle-light – each one a parishioner’s prayer. For the Nuit Blanche, there is an ‘installation lumineuse’ that borders on the sacrilegious. The gaudy plexiglas and neon light ‘crystals’ certainly do not ‘illuminate the faith’ as promised, but do result in some funky photo lighting. Thankfully, no tour buses are in sight.
I could not visit Paris without somehow evoking Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Callaghan. The best way to do this was a visit to the Quartier Latin. We have a glass of wine on the sidewalk terrace of the old café haunt of Hemingway, Sartre and Picasso, Les Deux Magots. The extortionate prices were surely never paid by Hemingway in his early and poor years in Paris. Having read Hemingway’s Paris memoirs A Moveable Feast, it seemed an appropriate title for this post: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."The evening ends with a few other Nuit Blanche stops. We pass by the Jardin du Luxembourg with its giant disco ball suspended from a crane, dubbed the Eiffel Tower’s mistress, promising to return the ‘stars’ to the city. On our way back to the hotel, we happen by the Observatory with its green laser beam penetrating the night sky and a projection of the cosmos choreographed to a selection of Queen.
It is the first Sunday of the month and this means free museums in Paris. The Musée du Louvre is deceivingly quiet when we arrive at opening. By the time we reach the first treasure, the Venus de Milo, the crowds are getting difficult. We take the initiation tour of the Louvre and merely scratch the surface of its offerings: Mona Lisa, Winged Victory of Samothrace, Michaelangelo’s Slave, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People... The museum buildings themselves are a marvel; Tom wants to return again on a mechanic’s creeper to fully appreciate the ceiling decoration. We exit through Pei’s Grande Pyramide to a much more awake Paris.
To arrive at Musée Rodin, we pass by the traditional and Beetlejuice-esque sculptures of Jardins des Tuileries and the Theban obelisk of Place de la Concorde. Musée Rodin is set in the tranquil gardens of Hôtel Biron. At various times, Rodin, Matisse, Rilke and Cocteau lived here. It is a great escape; we eat in their outdoor cafe and spend a few hours contemplating The Thinker, The Gates of Hell, The Kiss and The Burghers of Calais. Rodin’s characteristic oversized hands seem to lend more emotion to these figures. It is a sublime experience and there is the feeling that this is truly a rare place in the world.
As we leave Musée Rodin for our pilgrimage to Cimetière du Père Lachaise, we are blinded by the gold dome of the Hôtel des Invalides. A metro ride later and we are in that vast cemetery home to 800,000 dead and a few local cats. We are here because Tom decided he had to see the final resting place of Chopin and the hands that composed Ballad No 1, Opus 23 in G Minor, even if they are now reduced to dust. On this cool autumn day, dead leaves crackle underfoot and add to this perfectly spooky setting for a (good) horror film. We spend a few hours wandering around the labyrinthine paths and get even more disoriented off the paths trying to find the graves of Moliere, Balzac, Proust, Stein, Wilde, Morrison, and others. I scare myself by peeking into broken tombs and knowing that I am undoubtedly walking on the dead (in my usual approach to cemeteries, I do not tread over the bodies themselves...). The graves are often marked with gothic doorways - hopefully one-way... This is not your typical grassy cemetery; it is all stone and white dust. Built-in planters with often ironically dead plants adorn many of the tombs. Modern visitors pay tacky tributes with plastic flowers. Chopin, luckily, has well-tended live plants.
Two of the most popular graves are those of Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde. Having moved to Paris only a few months before his death, Jim Morrison’s body lies beneath a stone reading ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ. This Greek inscription literally means ‘according to his own demon’. Less ominous, Oscar Wilde’s grave is covered in lipstick kisses. These are apparently a tribute to his daring homosexual lifestyle and because he was jailed for love. However, the kisses added while we were there seemed more the result of peer pressure and the novelty of it all.
Our last stop is Montmartre where we’ve given ourselves a few hours to decompress over views of Paris and a relaxing meal. We walk up the steps of the Basilique du Sacré Coeur – reminiscent of our own Oratory. Great views of the city await at the top. We dine at one of those ubiquitous Parisian institutions: the streetside café, post 19.00 (we’ve learned our lesson). A guitarist, accordionist and violinist take turns serenading us. We also have the cultural pleasure of rude wait staff over our steak frites and wine.We board the Eurostar for our return journey, a paler shade than when we left (recall Paris dust), possibly a few pounds lighter, short on sleep and ready to plan our trip to Italy(!). We better figure out this ‘pacing’ thing if we’re to spend a week there...
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