Greatness

Celina lives several blocks from the Cathedral de Notre Dame so we walked past it daily.  It was glorious.  Apartments and offices in Paris are kept low; around 5 stories high.  So churches and monuments dominate the skyline.  Inside the Cathedral a plaque showed it was built in the 12th century and it was still great--even now.  And at the Louvre--it too was a building far greater than I imagined.  It's columns and curtains and the audience of artistic masters that surrounded the square--I felt diminished before the art.

One sculpture piece was my favorite work in the museum: Captifs.  It was a presentation of four bronze captives representing four nations conquered by France.  Spain, Brandenburg, the Roman Empire, and Holland.  Each represented a different response: revolt, hope, resignation, and grief.  Like the Louvre and Notre Dame they were massive.  And I thought that the French have great things too--just like the Americans--and not everything in Europe is economized or small.