Paris

I am listening to Handel.  Specifically, I am listening to "Eternal Source of Light Divine," from his Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, Choir of King's College Cambridge.  An odd choice, perhaps, given the events of the last few hours in Paris; a German composer, an English choir.  Odd besides I suppose for being what an atheist would want to hear at such a moment, but here we are.  Handel's Ode was written in celebration of not only the Queen's birthday, but also to mark the conclusion, in 1713 of the  the Treaty of Utrecht and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. As the reader of history will know, Marlborough's triumph was not a happy outcome for France.  In my defence, I would only say that Handel's music transcends the history that occasioned it's composition and that what I needed most tonight was to hear voices raised in something other than either anger or grief.  


I'd already listened to the crowd from the soccer stadium singing La Marseillaise as they left the interrupted game.  And of course, I'd spent the evening listening to the news reports, watching the live coverage from the streets of Paris, heard that first, chilling volley from inside the Bataclan concert hall.  I do not doubt that was the weekend goes on, this horror will become as familiar as the last, and yet I will feel compelled to watch it all again, to read the newspapers and the magazines, to argue with the analysis, to wonder at the the resilience of the survivors and to curse the fanaticism of the murderers.

But just now, I need beauty, balance, grace.  I need the solemnity of Handel and the purity of an English choir.

Meanwhile, and in better keeping with events I took up a French author to read something, anything to remind me of Paris.  The book, much read, fell open to a passage from Book Six, Chapter 1.  It begins:

"Twenty years ago there was still to be seen, in the south-east corner of the Place de la Bastille, near the canal-port dug out of the former moat of the prison-fortress, a weird monument which has vanished from the memory of present day Parisians but which deserves to have left some trace of itself, for it sprang from the mind of a member of the Institute, none other than the Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Egypt."

And so I spent an hour with Hugo.  I clambered with Gavroche and the little ones, up the ladder and into the belly of the Elephant of the Bastille; that "crumbling, scabby monster."  I wanted reminding of the passage of history, the value of even a brief life, of life, and joy, and suffering, and of art.  I wanted the light of another Paris, which has of course survived worse and will endure so long as art and life endure.  I wanted a reminder too that Paris is more than light, and history more than a record of wars and the hubris of violent men.  As Hugo says a moment later, "A touch of roughness is salutary to weak nerves."

I read on and on, the story familiar even to the feel on the pages between my fingers.  

It was important, somehow, to be in the company of  great souls tonight, and to be not just with France -- if only in my study, Les Miserables in my lap -- but with humanity.