I am posting here the second
of four pieces that I wrote “freelance” for The Milton Times. (This
piece appeared in the newspaper on May 16th under the headline “The
Eiffel Tower: C’est Magnifique!”)
Waiting
in the taxi line at Charles de Gaulle Airport, my wife and I rehearsed the
directions to our rental apartment in Paris that we would need to give to our
driver: Numéro cinq, rue de José Maria de
Heredia, le septième arrondissement.
Very easy. Très facile. Well, fortunately we had an iPhone 5 with a GPS, as our
driver turned out to be Chinese, with French almost as unseasoned as ours. He had no English whatsoever.
Yet,
the first successful conversation in French that I engaged in after we landed
was with that driver. It was very
simple and completely one-sided, but it worked. It involved me asking: “Qu’est-ce
que c’est?” (What’s
that?) We were in the heart of
Paris, less than five minutes from our apartment. I was pointing at the Eiffel Tower. The driver looked at me in the mirror
like I was crazy—and then he realized I was kidding him, and he laughed and so
did I. My wife rolled her eyes.
I
thought of that “conversation” every day for two months when I stepped out the
front door of our apartment building and glanced to my right and every evening
when I returned via the Metro and, rounding our corner, looked straight at the
Eiffel Tower. Could I ever get
used to seeing such an iconic edifice on a daily basis, multiple times each
day? I hoped not.
In
his essay “The Loss of the Creature,” well-known American novelist Walker Percy
describes the difficulty of ever seeing someplace universally familiar in a
unique or original way. He
explains how “picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders” and even the
familiar name of the familiar site create a “package” that prevents the
individual from experiencing a “sovereign discovery”: how can you ever just
stumble upon THE EIFFEL TOWER or THE GRAND CANYON (one of Percy’s examples) or
THE SISTINE CHAPEL? How can you
avoid feeling the anxiety that your experience might not be “measuring up” to
the expectations created by the packaging that probably put that site on your
travel itinerary in the first place?
Percy
offers several stratagems or hypothetical scenarios that would allow the
traveler to have the “sovereignty” of a discoverer—that is, to have a uniquely
personal experience. Some of them
are practical: for instance, you could go off the beaten track. Some of them are extreme—even
apocalyptic: yes, you would see everything anew in the wake of a natural
disaster!
But
the real-life scenario that I found most effective with the Eiffel Tower was
simply to allow it to stand there in its own light at every different hour of
the day. I jogged past it in the
morning. I stood on the Champs de
Mars at midnight with my wife, watching its flashing lights ignite the sky like
a Fourth of July sparkler. I
walked between its arching legs on my way to someplace else. I caught glimpses of it from side
streets and between buildings. I
even took on the assignment of photographing it from a variety of random angles
for a friend’s daughter’s school project.
I never saw it as a postcard, and I never saw it the same way twice.
Of
course, I was afforded those multiple perspectives by virtue of living in its
shadow (almost literally) every day for two months. But Walker Percy seems not to take into account how even
what we take for granted can still catch us off guard the way that the Eiffel
Tower did the very first time I saw it.
That was six years ago.
Arriving in Paris late at night, exhausted after a long flight, I was
utterly stunned to see its illuminated grandeur through the windshield of an
airport shuttle bus. I shouted at
the driver: “THE EIFFEL TOWER!” He
looked at me like I was crazy.
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