‘The next time you’ll be here is with the love of your life. Or, a love at least.’ Slightly pessimistic view on romance, I thought.
‘Remember this moment, when I said that to you, just now’
Mum’s wisdom hit me like a train that hasn’t yet left the station as we watched the Eiffel Tower sparkle, 9pm as the clock strikes, for the second night in a row. Enjoyed it without phones in our hands, not because of our digital independency, but because we’d done the whole show yesterday. Grinning selfies, grainy filters applied to cutely cropped photos of the upper tower, videos attempting to predict the beginning of the light show sitting discarded in the recycle bin. We’d given the Eiffel Tower an involuntary photoshoot, and now we were stood around criticising our co-tourists for being obsessed with their damn screens. Why can’t they just enjoy the moment?
From yesterday, when we weren’t all technophobic.
But this time, stood in front of the crowd of screenagers with their phones pointed eagerly upwards, we wanted only to watch the lights one more time. They’re not overwhelming, but there is something sweet in seeing the city’s presiding monument sparkle for no commemorative reason other than it looks nice. It’s sweet that that’s enough of a reason to do it, that it just looks nice.
It’s pretty. Somewhere in one the city’s few high-rise corporate towers, a disgruntled financial exec is moaning about the low ROI of that energy expenditure. I’m glad they’re not listening to him.
I think that’s another charming anachronism of Paris. That it does things just because they’re beautiful. You feel it throughout the city, the random jazz players on bridges, the good-faith bookstores with no shopkeepers, relying on the general integrity of humanity. Paris has kept faith in humanity, faith in our attraction to pretty, shiny, beautiful things. We’re losing this everywhere else, everywhere else where we’re ruthlessly efficient and deadly focused on productivity and slashing costs.
The irony of course is that Paris’ metro system blows the London Underground out of the water. Not because Paris has a greater aesthetic appreciation, but nevertheless it’s proof that the two can coexist. That we don’t have to give up our humanity in order to cover our livelihoods. That we can make time and space for beauty on the balance sheets.
There’s a glass pyramid on the right bank of the Seine, in the first arrondissement (which always reminds me of the ‘districts’ of the hunger games). Underground, in this glass pyramid, there’s some of the most evocative paintings, sculptures, and artifacts that our species has created.
There’s hundreds of rooms, and in each one you’re confronted by the totality
of a person’s life, by the stature or fresco that they dedicated their creative life to completing. That they looked at and thought, well if I’m remembered for nothing else but this I’ll be happy. I might live on. You have the opportunity to allow these people to live on, to remain in the general consciousness just a little while longer.
And yet there’s so many rooms, and so many pieces in each, that you can’t see them all. You can’t pay attention to all the ones you even see. Look down at your phone while you’re walking along, and you’ve missed six lifetimes. I’m sure someone else will walk up, take a picture and half heartedly read the caption next to it, and move on. Probably delete the picture cause someone’s finger was in the bottom right corner. But for a brief second, that fifteenth-century danish painter lived, lived in the furrowed brow and thoughtful gaze of the tourist.
These creators, and their humanity, lived on through their art. And yet we who are alive are determined to destroy our humanity while we have it, destroy it with AI girlfriends and Apple Vision Pros. Paris feels like a city untouched by artificial intelligence. A city determined to preserve its intentionality and humanity. That’s why the Les Deux Magots cafe, the one frequented by Sartre and Brecht and de Beauvoir and Joyce and Baldwin and Camus, still has a queue for the entrance on a Thursday morning. Buried beneath the deepfakes and the overstimulation, we still want to celebrate our humanity.
And i guess, what bigger favour can we do those who dedicated their lives to capturing humanity than allow them to live on?
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