A Collegiate Way of Life at Baylor University

Since arriving late Tuesday morning in Istanbul, our days have been full. From Serkeci station, we took the tram a short ride to the Sultanahmet stop, luggage in tow, and walked only a block to the Hotel Arcadia. We checked in, walked back up the street, and sat down for a light lunch at Pasha’s. Aside from having to look across the street at the ubiquitous McDonald’s facade, we had a pleasant snack al fresco (or whatever the equivalent Turkish expression is).

The rest of our Baylor group was en route from Amsterdam, but we had just enough time to walk three or four blocks in each direction from the hotel: down to the Sultanahmet Mosque (the Blue Mosque), over to Hagia Sophia, back up the main throughway in the direction of the Grand Bazaar. No sooner had we gotten back to the room than the phone rang. Cenk Eronat, our Tutku tour guide, was calling to let us know that everyone had arrived and that they were in the lobby checking in. How wonderful it was to be once more in the company of friends, to exchange greetings, relay news, and tell stories, and to find ourselves together at the beginning of a great quest spanning the next few weeks.

Before dinner, we met Scott Moore and found a shady watering hole to gather at, enjoy cold drinks, and catch up on our recent doings. Dinner, convened on the roof of the Hotel Arcadia, marked a welcome return for the Henrys to real dining. Having been on the move so much the previous week, we really hadn’t had a well-served, leisurely dinner in some time. The celebrated views from our hotel restaurant are not overdone. We have the best views over the old city, bar none. The whole Sultanahmet area lies at our feet, and with views of the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, the Bosphorus, and distant mountains across the Marmaris Sea–to say nothing of the company of friends, the meal proved truly lovely. A short evening stroll through the ancient Roman hippodrome over to Hagia Sophia and back capped off an early evening before bed.

Collecting my thoughts about Istanbul isn’t easy. From the minute we stepped off our train at Sirkeci, we fully appreciated the fact that we were in a place multiple degrees of difference from anywhere else we’ve been. The colors, odors, textures, and rhythms of everything convey the differences in a thousand little ways. Athens, by contrast, even with its non-Latin alphabet, strikes me as far more familiar. Here in Istanbul, where East and West meet, I am far more of an alien.

Yet at the same time, the city is far less “other” than I had imagined. Walking out the west end of the train station we stared down both of the two major U.S.-based hamburger franchises. (And yes, I refuse to credit them here with their proper names.) Any number of familiar cognates and transliterations of English words are there for the reading in every direction, and our environs are filled with so many countless English-speaking Turks, not even considering the tourists, that it’s seldom difficult to communicate what’s needed. And of course all kinds of far more banal, utterly stable features of ordinary human experience obtain: land is land, sea is sea, sky is sky, up is up, down is down, money buys convenience, and people are people, viz. they belong to the genus of bipedal mammals and are differentiated by way of their capacity for such things as language, reason, and the love of God.

So Istanbul confronts me at one and the same time with difference and sameness. Hagia Sophia provides an apt, though incomplete key to the complicated cipher Istanbul presents. Grandest and most capacious Christian church in the world for a thousand years, it’s surrounded by the Muslim minarets built around it after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It presents the familiar visual tableau of a church built on a lavish scale, but with things slightly off kilter. Having gone inside it on our second day, I can make this claim with all the greater confidence. The mihrab, oriented toward Mecca, is in fact actually off kilter, angled as it is to the south of the east-west centerline of the church. The plastered over Christian mosaics and the large black roundels bearing the Arabic names of God, Mohammed, and later caliphs are even more conspicuous complications of an otherwise more familiar ecclesial geography. Much is comfortably recognizable; important and occasionally alienating transformations abound.

In those stretches of time when all seems ordinary–like now, in this passing minute of an hour’s respite in the hotel room–it only takes the amplified, echoing chants of the muezzins of a dozen nearby mosques, calling the Mohammaden faithful to render timely prayers to Allah, to jolt me back into a realistic appraisal of my surroundings.

“You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3) and “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4) come naturally to me. Really, I should say, they are words expressing convictions and commitments that come supernaturally to me. By contrast, lā ʾilāha ʾillà I-Lāh” (“There is no god except God”) sounds unnatural to my anglophone ears and comes awkwardly off my tongue. More crucially, despite a superficial similarity to the words of the Torah, they are also bound up with a tradition–a way of being, thinking, and doing–that gives them an altogether different sense. They are words that come to me neither naturally nor supernaturally, and hearing the muezzins’ Arabic call to pray five times each day, beginning before five in the morning and recurring until after ten in the evening, confirms how far we have come in arriving at this ancient-modern city cradled between Europe and Asia.

Budapest, the modern union of the two ancient cities of Buda and Pest, is laying claim to new stature among Europe’s great cities. So says the mayor of Budapest, and public relations overstatement aside, I believe it.

Of all our stops along the way in our family recreation of the Orient Express, our evening and day in Budapest was the most surprisingly enjoyable. No doubt we arrived in Budapest largely absent knowledge of what to expect. Sure, we had read a recent American Airlines magazine piece on the city in connection with new direct service AA has begun from the U.S. And yes, we had looked through a handful of travel books before going. But nothing we read prepared us to be as delighted with Budapest as we were.

Our first pleasant surprise came in the form of the Budapest Marriott, situated a few blocks south of the Chain Bridge on the Pest side of the Danube. We approached the hotel from the back side, and before I knew it was the Marriott I commented, “That is about the ugliest building I have ever seen.” My unspoken thought was, “It looks like a communist era detention facility into which a dissident might go and never return.” Michele asked, “What if told you it’s the Marriott?” I was so convinced she was joking that I didn’t even bother to reply. I don’t know the history of the building, but it turns out that the side facing the river features large windows with beautiful vantages up and down the river and across the river to Buda Hill. It was lovely, even stately, inside the hotel.

We checked in and promptly made our way up to the ninth floor executive suite, once more courtesy of Michele’s platinum status, where we reveled in the walls of glass all around us, abundant food and drink, free wi-fi, and on top of everything else, a chance for Michele to watch Roger Federer battle his way to the finals of the French Open. We had breakfast the next morning on the terrace in open air. This is the life, I thought more than once.

On Friday evening after dinner we walked over to Szent István-bazilika (St. Stephen’s Basilica), a relatively modern church built in the nineteenth century that’s named for the patron saint of Hungary. St. Stephen I brought a modicum of order to Hungary–so much so that the basilica’s relic, the right forearm and hand of St. Stephen, is called “the right hand of God.” Because an organ concert was beginning just as we arrived, we didn’t get in, so we settled on returning the next day.

We walked back through a vibrant area of the city, between the Deák Ferenc tér metro station and the river, where we stumbled upon an outdoor book fair. What a shame that I don’t read Magyar, because I later learned we were at the 82nd annual installment of the National Book Fair. Sponsored by the Hungarian Publishers’ and Booksellers’ Association (est. 1789), the publicity line describes it as a “celebration of contemporary letters and publishing of unparalleled history” in which “publishers and booksellers move out to the streets to meet the reading public in a literary fiesta.” Authors signing books, steeply discounted titles, and a buzz of excitement filled the plaza. If only . . . .

Saturday morning gave us a chance to get into Szent István’s, though we couldn’t walk up the nave toward the altar because a German tour group had arranged for morning Mass. The brilliant gold painting and leafing of the interior were extraordinary, and the high dome–the second one, since the first one caved in early on due to poor design and inferior workmanship–was impressive. Since we’re on our way to Istanbul and we’ll see Hagia Sophia tomorrow, I really shouldn’t say anything superlative about Szent István’s.

All three of us took a break to enjoy a treat of gelato, wondrously wrought into the shape of a rose atop the cone. I went with a three flavor combination of coffee in the middle surrounded by gelato “petals” of cinnamon and chocolate. Michele’s choices, shared with Zachary, were chocolate, basil-lemon, and sour cherry. Hers were more colorful than my monochromatic options, but I wager mine tasted finer.

From the vicinity of Szent István’s we walked down to the Danube and crossed the Chain Bridge, the site of significant demonstrations and ultimately celebrations as communism collapsed in Hungary. Across the river we ascended a steep but pleasantly shaded path to the top of Buda Hill. Here, the quaint scale of the medieval village around St. Matthias is well preserved. Our jaunt through the village took us eventually to the church where the Hungarian kings of centuries bygone held their coronation ceremonies. It’s a fairly small, intimate church in comparison to Szent István’s Basilica and St. Stephen’s Cathedral (in Vienna).

Zachary’s growing skills in reading iconography were apparent in St. Stephen’s. He picked out St. Peter easily (“the bald one with the keys”) and St. Paul right after (“he’s got a sword!”). I only wish I had the wherewithal to answer his questions about images I don’t know how to read.

For that matter I wish I knew how to answer his much harder questions about the origin of evil. “Dad, why was Hitler evil? Was his dad evil? Why was Ceausescu evil? Was his dad evil?” These and like inquiries have arisen along the way, often uttered in what to my thinking are inconveniently public places and in Zachary’s clarion child’s voice. Yet why shouldn’t any of us ask urgent, existentially important questions whenever they occur? Why should it be awkward for a child to shout out perplexity over the origin, existence, and destructive power of evil? Only two things, both of them inadequate, come to mind. One is our inability to answer the questions sufficiently, even leaving aside the challenge of translation into the vernacular and experience of five-year-olds. The other is concern that those overhearing the questions might be embarrassed at a patrimony that they’d prefer to renounce. On both counts my response is “so what.” Let them–yes, and let us–renounce evil near and far wherever we find it. And let us struggle through to the best answers we can offer to the most pressing matters.

Outside the church we walked up the stairs to Fisherman’s Bastion, a high terrace looking out over the Danube that’s named after the Fisherman’s guild that had responsibility for defending this stretch of the city walls during the middle ages. From there, looking back down on the plaza next to the church, we saw a falconer with his tawny bird of prey inviting the tourists to pose for pictures. For a lavish 500 forints we gave Zachary–a Live Oak Falcon, after all–the chance to hold the falcon on his forearm and pose with the bird’s outstretched wing around his shoulder. Maybe he’ll have real respect for his school’s mascot after seeing such a mighty specimen up close.

We took the tram down the hill to the bridge, walked back to Pest, and took Michele to a street-side spa offering fish pedicures. Zachary and I had a cool drink nearby. Then we dashed back to the Marriott to retrieve our bags, hiked to the metro station, and rode to the Keleti terminal to catch our evening train to Bucharest.

We left a great deal of Budapest untouched, unseen, unheard. We have to leave it unsung as well. Were I to have opportunity to return, I’d come without hesitation, and I’d hope to arrive better prepared. For one thing, I wish I understood at least some rudiments of Magyar. It is not a romance language, so it appears dramatically alien to an English speaking American, without any discernible cognates. I’ve read that its nearest European cousin is Finnish. For another, I wish I had a better grasp of the rich history of the Hungarians, at least for starters in their medieval, Habsburg, and Ottoman periods. Yet again, I wish I knew someone from Budapest that is familiar with its history and traditions. I’m confident I’d be disappointed in the usual round-the-city guided tour, but a profoundly knowledgeable native would be a boon. Another day, Deo volente.

I’ve been writing aboard the Bosphor, a well made vintage German train that runs under Romanian purview from Bucharest to Istanbul. Its deeply stained paneling and brass fixtures are striking. The compartment adjacent to our sleeper was empty (the whole sleeper is mostly empty, though new company board en route), so the conductor offered to open the pass-through door and give us use of both rooms for €25. Taking up his offer may be the single best investment we make in all our travels. The difference in space, though only mathematically double in square feet or cubic feet, is at least quadruple in term of pleasantness of experience. We’re not quite up to the standards of the Orient Express of yesteryear, but we can squint our eyes hard and imagine it from where we sit.

We’ve stopped to have passports stamped on exit from Romania and entry into Bulgaria, and it’s high time for an afternoon snack. I’ll upload to the blog at the earliest opportunity after we arrive in Istanbul.

We’re in Bucharest on the executive floor of the J.W. Marriott overlooking the “people’s palace” that Ceauşescu ostentatiously built. I am rather ashamed to stay in such a nice place after walking around the city all afternoon yesterday. It’s quite a depressing scene. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed everywhere we’ve been and we’ve learned loads–until Bucharest. It’s not that there’s nothing to gain from being here, but rather that it’s on the order of thanking God for saving us from an earthly poverty of fine culture, books, ideas, and yes, material comforts, that seems to exist on every side here. Maybe that’s a lesson for which we’re most in need. God help these people of Bucharest.

The train from Hungary, which arrived here late morning yesterday, showed us a beautiful Romanian country that I now recognize in stark contrast to Bucharest. The countryside is full of small and poor villages, but with none of the stifling depression of the city. God’s wondrous creation has marvels not as dramatically marred by man’s poor creations out there. Romania’s best future, it seems to me, lies in the stewarding of its agricultural and natural resources. The land at least seems fertile, ample, and susceptible of significant development.

Once we arrived at Gara du Nord, we took a taxi to the hotel and predictably got ripped off. He wouldn’t use his meter, he drove the long way around to the hotel, and he asked for 78 lei, around $25. We decided that someone in his pitiable condition needed an extra fifteen dollars more than we do. If not, God knows. In any case, since happiness is “joy in truth,” as Augustine writes, whatever God knows of all of us, we will have to acknowledge if we are to rejoice in his presence. If the driver stole from us, he will repent or remain diminished in his capacity for the love of God, and if we gave too little, the same thing will be true for us.

The hotel itself is beautiful, and having access to the executive lounge gives us free wi-fi, food, and drink. And since all of our hotel stays have been covered with Marriott points, it really is free. Relative to fine hotels anywhere in the world, there’s nothing remarkable about this particular J.W. Marriott, so I won’t write further on that subject.

We spent the afternoon walking around the city. We hoped to see the Zlatari Church where the wonder-working hand of St. Cyprian is kept as a relic, but we somehow missed it. We saw the Casa Capşa coffee house, which is said to be (by its proprietors?) “the only intellectual place on Victory Avenue.” Since it was Sunday, I missed my chance for some sophisticated conversation, as it was closed. We walked by the Palace of the Military Club, a solid looking building about a century old built as a gathering place for officers in the Romanian army. Since the only intelligent discussions allegedly take place up the street at the coffee house, I’m not sure what goes on in the military club. The most remarkable sight we saw was the Palace of the Senate outside the old Palace Square–now called Revolution Square. It was here that Ceauşescu gave his last famous public speech before the crowds turned violently and, by his lights uncomprehendingly, against him, forcing him to flee thereafter by helicopter from the top of the roof. The garish monument in memory of the fallen civilians killed by Ceaușescu’s loyalists stands prominently in the square.

We stopped by a terrific children’s playground in the park adjacent to the “people’s palace” that now serves as the national parliament. Zachary jumped right in with the other children in climbing, yelling, sliding, and general fun-making. The playground looks new, and though it stands in an enormous, unkempt park full of high grass and weeds, it struck me as a wonderful, simple expression of the hope of a new generation against the hopeless presumption of Ceauşescu’s foolhardy architectural monstrosity. That building required razing a number of churches, homes for many thousands people, and some other beautiful public buildings, and it cost the Romanian people their livelihoods and lives as Ceauşescu starved them to pay the enormous foreign debts he took on. There’s nothing else like it in the whole world, and for that we have cause to give thanks to God yet again.

Well, I’ve got our tickets on the “Bosphor” train leaving Bucharest at 12:13 p.m. They cost us around 665 lei, or about $220. We’ll arrive tomorrow morning in Istanbul between 7-8 in the morning. This will be our longest train ride, but we’ll have the comfort and privacy of a sleeper car again. They’re a great way to go on these long trips. The one we had from Budapest had a private toilet and shower. It worked remarkably well. I’m afraid it may have set us up for a disappointment on the last leg of our make-shift version of the Orient Express.

I have yet to post anything about Budapest, but I’ll try to write something retrospectively and get it on the blog later.

Our long overnight rail travel from Budapest to Bucharest is underway. The “Ister” leaves Budapest Keleti daily at 19:10 and arrives at Bucharest Nord at 11:38 the next morning. We left right on time, and I’m hopeful we’ll arrive at the other end right on time as well. We were booked, courtesy of the concierge at the Budapest Marriott, in a comfortable first-class sleeper that gives us ample space and a private WC with a shower. For it we paid 66,500 Hungarian Forints (HUF), or a little less than $350. All things considered, our eastern European sleeper is more comfortable than the German train from Paris to Munich.

Vienna and Budapest brought us many delights and new sights. We found ourselves so busy that I’ve not had time until now to post anything to the blog, but with a long ride ahead, now is a good time to catch up.

Vienna left a strongly favorable impression upon us, and I can imagine returning for an extended stay. We arrived just after two o’clock on Thursday morning. We took about an hour to get to our hotel, located on Schoenbrunn Schlossstrasse near the grand old imperial palace, its extensive grounds, and the oldest zoo in the world, begun as a menagerie kept by Her Imperial Majesty Maria Theresa.

After checking in we took the train back to the city center and spent time at two of Vienna’s churches, Karlskirche and St. Stephens. The former required a higher visitor’s fee than I wanted to pay, so we only looked around the outside of the church. Commissioned by Charles VI in honor of his namesake, St. Charles Borromeo, it has an impressively designed facade indeed. Though we didn’t see inside, in Karlsplatz we did haggle with a street artist for his ink pen drawings of two vantages of grand Viennese architecture, Karlskirche included.

At St. Stephen’s, we arrived just in time to attend Vespers. Not only did we have the welcome occasion to sit and pray, but we also gained access beyond the gawking tourists at the gates in the back of the church and saw the better part of the cathedral. To my regret, I was lost sooner in the service than I expected. I anticipated that some of the sung responses wouldn’t be printed and that we’d have to listen closely, make sense of what German we could, and follow to the best of our ability. When one of the first songs was in fact printed, I was encouraged. Thereafter, I couldn’t make the least sense of where in the service we were in relation to the printed program. Eventually I gave up following the program and simply listened. After the service, when we learned that the programs set out in our area were not for the service we attended, the depth of my confusion made sense. Never-minding my discombobulation, I enjoyed being in the beautiful cathedral church of Cardinal Schönborn, about whom I’ve heard many good things.

Avoiding the ubiquitous McDonalds and Burger Kings has not been an easy task, though we’ve been mostly successful. Still, Michele was not initially inclined to take Zachary to dinner at Wiener Wold until I pointed out the chicken on the bottom of the sign. We ended up with a quite pleasant and affordable family meal of roasted chicken and a dish somewhat akin to gnocchi. We’ll give a generous nod of the head to Wiener Wold.

Our Thursday evening included a walking tour that took in some of the environs of the Austrian Parliament and a trip to Prater Park to ride the Riesenrad, the enormous “Ferris wheel” constructed in 1897 in honor of the emperor’s golden jubilee, destroyed in WWII, and rebuilt by the Austrians in a show of renewed civic life after the war. The views of Vienna from its highest point were truly spectacular. Zachary reveled in the height and the sights, but he especially loved our little roller coaster ride afterwards on the “Dizzy Mouse.” The coaster cars, shaped like mice, scurry back and forth on the rails, descending to a grand finale that involves being swallowed whole by a giant wooden cat before the car returns to the queue. He’s scarcely stopped asking whether or not I like the dizzy mouse or the puddy cat better.

Friday morning gave us time to take the short tour of the imperial residence, Schönbrunn Palace, and walk around the inner circle of the zoo, both of which were enjoyable. The history of the palace and the Habsburg rule was, frankly, more interesting than the palace itself. But the zoo was the finest we’ve seen in terms of the quality of the exhibits. It’s well designed for visitors to see the animals from a wide variety of perspectives, and we saw more active behaviors exhibited than we recall elsewhere. Michele ranks it ahead of the San Diego zoo, a rather astounding approval of what began so long ago as a little more than a conversation piece in it’s days as the imperial menagerie.

From the zoo we had to make tracks to get back to the Marriott Courtyard for our bags, board the metro, and return to Wien Meidling for the train to Budapest. We had a 24-hour stopover booked, so when the RJ 63 train arrived at 2:07 from Munich, as it had the previous day when we disembarked, we simply boarded and took our same seats.

We’ve found the German cities we’ve visited to be charming. Our March days in Hamburg and Bremen were enjoyable. Though we had only a few hours of layover in Munich, its center city appeared full of the evidence of a vital civic, commercial, and ecclesial life. By our lights Vienna takes the charms of a Germanic people’s city to a new level. It has the lore of its history as an imperial capital along with its present stature as the capital city of Austria, yet it somehow retains the comfortable scale of a small, pedestrian friendly city. Public transportation is abundant, clean, efficient, and modern. City streets offer an exemplary model of mixed use zoning, with public, commercial, and residential spaces well allocated. The architecture all around conveys an eye for quality of design and construction; no slapdash cinderblock or sheet metal shacks here. Some of it is singularly awe inspiring, as for instance St. Stephen’s with its vertiginous single spire, one-of-a-kind roof design, and gothic piety.

St. Augustine makes a convincing argument in De Civitas Dei that there is no true commonwealth to be found in the earthly city, because a true commonwealth requires agreement about what is right and hence justice, which is only to be found perfectly in the rule of Christ. Thus, only in the city of God shall we find a people bound together such that goods are shared harmoniously and by the deliverances of justice. In the earthly city, guided as it is by a different faith, hope, and love, all manner of things tends to go awry. I don’t doubt any of it. Still, in some human communities more is amiss and in others more is admirable. Without taking our brief, unrepresentative sampling of Vienna as the whole, it nonetheless seems to provide an instance of the earthly city less diminished by the malaise common to man and less riven by the corrosive elements of late modernity than most I’ve seen.

Changing the terms of argument, were I a twenty-first-century Hamlet looking for a place to go in escape from something rotten in the state of Denmark or elsewhere, Vienna would offer a viable possibility. “The Murder of Gonzago,” the play within Shakespeare’s Hamlet, slurs Vienna for no good reason in making its villain Viennese. To the contrary of Shakespeare’s depreciation of Vienna, I say three cheers for the Viennese.

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.

Triomphe. Our second day in Paris brought us triumph even though we began inauspiciously.

After a splendid breakfast at the Marriott, we walked the couple of blocks to the metro station and inadvertently bought weekend day passes for the metro instead of weekday, for a net loss of about fifteen dollars. Then, we rode the metro to the Natural History Museum where Zachary was set to see his fill of dinosaur bones, only to learn on arrival that the museum is closed on Tuesdays. Never mind that the web site specifically said the contrary. (Now that I’m back writing again, having gotten in our trip as far as Munich, I can say we subsequently learned that only the Hall of Evolution is closed on Tuesdays, and had we walked to the other end of the jardin to the building that houses the dinosaur bones, we may well have found it open.)

Since we were in the southeast portion of the Latin Quarter, we took a meandering walk through a portion of the city that we otherwise might not have taken time to see. The Pantheon, the Sorbonne, and the Jardin du Luxembourg with its lovely sights of the Medici Fountain and the French Senate were our reward.

The Pantheon was especially interesting. The original Foucault’s Pendulum and memorials to the French grands hommes in the crypt get most attention, but I particularly rallied around the touching, lovely murals depicting St. Genevieve’s care for the Parisians of her long-ago days. It’s a telling irony that in one and the same building (it is no longer a church) significant homage is paid to the likes of Diderot and Rousseau, whose monuments in the crypt stand before all others. They were great wits, no doubt, but they hardly exercised the quality of charity for the people of Paris that St. Genevieve lavished devotedly upon them.

From the Jardin du Luxembourg we took the metro over to the Bin Harkeim station, from which we made a ten minute walk to the Eiffel Tower. I believe it may be the single most impressive monument I’ve seen. The scale of the thing cannot be appreciated in a picture. Its soaring ascent does not quite stymie the imagination, but it is quite astounding that a mere man, Monsieur Eiffel, would have wagered it practical to build in fact, in hard steel, a figment of the imagination on such scale. The views of the city in every direction from its summit were more than worth the tarrif.

We capped the day off by riding the metro over to Sacré Coeur. With freshly made crepes and cold drinks in hand we sat on a bench halfway up the long, steep walk up the hill to the church, enjoyed our meal, and looked out over the city as the sun begin setting.

Before sunset we walked on up to the church and joined a Mass already underway. We arrived in time to hear the Gospel reading and the homily. My French is so poor–nonexistent would be the honest truth–that the words themselves, taken strictly in their meaning, had little effect. Here’s a terrific instance, however, in which a distinction between the informative meaning and the performative meaning of words is helpful. Or if preferable, the difference between saying something and showing something is important. I could not understand much informatively beyond a reference in the reading to the virgin and l’enfant. Nonetheless I grasped a great deal in the assuring, clear conviction of faith in the voice of the priest, in the beauty of the choir of nuns, and in the presence of the great diversity of persons there to hear the word of the Lord, to receive grace for life, and to seek hope beyond the grave that looms near.

I regret that we did not stay for the whole service. My long-entrenched Protestant practices make it harder than my actual beliefs to enjoy what Catholics regard as the whole point of Mass, namely the consecration and the receiving of the Host. Perhaps if we had been present from the beginning of the service and seated nearer to the transept, we might have gone to the priest for a blessing, and in that way satisfied the terms of our “protest” and acknowledged publicly and poignantly the brokenness of the Church.

The upside of our early departure was time to walk the three hundred narrow, spiral stairs to the top of Sacré Coeur’s central dome before sunset. The western sun cast long-to-be-remembered reddish-orange hues over all the pale stonework of Paris’s sprawling center. Here’s how I interpret the tableau we witnessed: God’s grandeur, displayed in an ordinary sunset, overwhelmed all the petty pretenses of the grands hommes while it simultaneously ennobled the pious gestures of humility and profound sacrifice to be seen all around. If the rain falls on the just and the unjust, so also does the sun shine on both, but with a decidedly different meaning.