There was the music, of course, by Debussy and Berlioz and the art of Monet snd Picasso. But in college it was Albert Camus who incarnated Paris. Not Jean Paul Sartre, although I read his work on existentialism. Not Simone de Beauvoir either. It was Camus and his novels – The Stranger, the Plague – and his essays The Rebel and Art, Sedition and Death. I read about those intellectuals on the Left Bank. I went for the more accessible writings – Francoise Sagan and Antoine de St-Exupery and later on Roland Barthes. Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were too high above my comprehension. I had a copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness but I never went beyond the first chapter. The Little Prince is still my favorite book. I gave my rare copy of Peter Ustinov’s rendition on vinyl to my granddaughter Isabel on her wedding.
One time in the 1980s my wife took me to Paris. She attended a medical conference while I wandered the city, walking from the Hilton Hotel to different spots along the Seine, pausing at the stalls vending art work and books. We took the train to Paris from Belgium where we met an old college classmate in Bruges and dined on a green eel delicacy. I spent a lot of time doing Tai chi chuan at the Jardin de Tuilleries and then I would find myself at the Louvre contemplating the Mona Lisa and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. There was a huge collection in the museum but I had little interest in them. I was not into walk-throughs (and high intellectualism). It was like when one of my students, Elske, took me to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam: we wandered around fora while and and then I sat down and spent almost 2 hours meditating on the painting of the almond tree in bloom.
There were many cafes near the Eiffel Tower but I bought a take-out food like foie gras and baguette and a bottle of wine and ate in our room in the Hilton hotel for lunch. Lolit was tied up the whole day at the OB-Gyn conference. We watched the Moulin Rouge and a couple of other shows and hit the cafes at night. One time we ate at a great — and very expensive — Chinese restaurant along the Seine and shared a bottle of French wine.
The last time I travelled to Paris I took the Eurostar train from London. It was when the Da Vinci Code tours were still bestsellers. On my own I followed the trajectory in Paris. I cannot find the photos in my computer. On the way back to London, the train stopped, in the middle of the English channel, there was total darkness for about 30 minutes —and we thought Terrorism!
