Today is Thursday and we’re bound for Vienna. Already having passed through Salzburg, our Austrian-operated Railjet train winds its way through the verdant springtime hill country, and we should disembark shortly after two o’clock.
Yesterday, our third and final day in Paris, gave us a chance for a highly partial tour of the Louvre, a successful return to a thankfully open paleontological museum, a trip back to the Eiffel tower for a souvenir medallion coin to go with Zachary’s growing collection, a reprise of our previous day’s visit to the Arc de Triomphe, and a visit to the street-side purveyors of souvenir “art” along the Seine. We settled on two small, cheap, paint-by-numbers oils depicting Notre Dame in one and the Eiffel tower with Sacre Coeur in the other.
Along with the obligatory tourists’ visit to see the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, we spent some time in the Greek antiquities collection as well as the Egyptian antiquities section. Zachary chose the latter because he wanted to see a mummy make me afraid. The former, serendipitously, was on our way to the Egyptian artifacts. In the small room housing the Louvre’s small collection of sculptures from the Parthenon, I was struck by the preemptive defensive posturing apparent in what was written of the artifacts’ provenance. “Yes, these pieces are from the Athenian acropolis, but unlike that scoundrel Englishman Lord Elgin, we got our few trifles years earlier with clear permission from the Ottoman Empire, and we took them in any case in order to preserve them from ruin.” In my memory of the New Acropolis Museum’s guides, that the English offense is greater than the French’s–being of greater scale and involving damage to the temple–is no justification of the French’s despoiling the Athenians of their patrimony. Competing claims of ownership and stewardship loom large. We’ll enjoy revisiting these claims from the Greek vantage in a few weeks.
Zachary has been a great traveling companion. A year ago I didn’t think he could make the trip (and it turned out that we didn’t conduct the Baylor in Turkey and Greece program last year anyway). He can occupy himself quite well for long stretches of time in airplanes and trains. We’re trying to keep him interested in his books and toys, along with conversation about our itinerary and the sights, rather than playing Angry Birds on the iPad. So far the balance has been good. He’s just finishing a Magic Treehouse Book, Moonlight on the Magic Flute. It’s set in Vienna and involves an encounter Jack and Annie experience with a young Mozart (aka Wolfie) in the Imperial Court of her majesty Maria Theresa.
It’s from Zachary’s mouth that some incisive and insightful commentary has come. Thus, about the Arc de Triomphe, which we crossed under the street yesterday to see up close, he said, “It’s bigger than the Brooks arch.” This morning, in a quick walk to see the old Rothaus in Munich before catching our train connection, we walked through an arch into the old city and he said, “Brooks’ arch is longer than this one.” True enough words they were in both cases, and they were delightfully innocent expressions of a child’s perspective as well.
France has more to offer than Paris, and for that I’m certain many are glad. Even last evening, on the City Night Line from Paris to Munich, the pleasant French countryside and simple villages we saw before dark brought me as much pleasure as anything in Paris. We did enjoy our time in Paris, yet I confess that the city did not woo me.
I can summarize my disappointments with Paris in two ways. First, there are finer cities to be found. Rome’s ancient character is greater. London’s majesty is greater. New York’s commercial and financial stature is greater. I might add that each of those three great cities has a geography, an urban design, that is more human in scale than that of Paris. It’s as if, to compensate for its relative disadvantages to the likes of Rome, London, New York, and other great cities, the Parisians have worked in awkward self-consciousness to make their city seem greater than it is. Braggadocio seldom has its intended effect. To be sure, we met many good souls in our time in Paris, and I mean no diminution of their character in criticizing what their forebears have wrought upon their city.
Second, at every hand in Paris I saw bitter evidence of the Revolution’s laying to waste of the Church and the long-lingering aftereffects in a mostly secularized culture. The American Revolution truly was limited by comparison. In bringing the American people to rule democratically in the place of the king, the engines of war and violence of combat were never turned against the Church, as in France. Nor did the American Enlightenment, such as it was, involve making a mockery of pious Christian faith, as in France. Extremity, not reluctant measures taken in times of exigency, define the French experience in ways not known among the Americans. Were it possible for the French to recover the nourishment of institutions, authorities, and practices attuned to the soul’s need for roots, as Simone Weil describes things, they would be so much better off. Yet the revolution seems to have radically severed today’s French from their cultural, historical, and most of all spiritual roots, and it is difficult to discern what future there is for them in such a deracinated condition.
It’s after one o’clock and Vienna draws nearer. I’ll post this to the blog from the hotel, and then we’ll be off to the city center in short order.
