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.  

Axe Historique

During mid-tour leave I saw Paris for the first time.  The sophisticated window frames, the grey stone, and notched spires, and bulbous light, and people wearing skinny jeans, and holding hands, and drinking carafes of wine: all of these impossibilities in Yusufiya.

We walked along the line of the city, Le Axe Historique, where the Arc de Triomphe is framed by the promenade of the Champs.

"Welcome to the West," Celina said.  And we crossed the Place de la Concorde at the base of a gold-capped obelisk.  It was carved with hieroglyphs.  "I bet that's stolen from Egypt," I said.  Celina didn't know.  I learned later that Josephine asked Napoleon for an obelisk before he set out for Egypt in 1798.  Even though Napoleon won many victories then the obelisk wasn't taken until later.

So it seems the West is always conquering the East for something...