Bastille Day and more N-D

Well, I have quite a backlog of photos and events -- since last Tuesday I've been to Bastille Day celebrations, Notre Dame with my class (which was followed by an epic amount of steak), the lovely delicate Sainte-Chapelle for a concert, the Champs-Elysées, and Versailles. Oh, yeah, and class. Here are a few shots of poor quality from Bastille Day, taken from an intersection full of excited kids and their families. They shot fireworks over, next to, and from the Eiffel Tower. I love the smell of pyrotechnics.

On Wednesday our class returned to Notre Dame for our official cathedral visit there. I missed most of it because I declined to climb the towers based on the recent incident in the National Cathedral in which I failed to remove my face from the cool limestone wall of the narrow walkway right under the rose window ("but look at the bosses in the arches of the nave!" "no thanks!"). Instead I wandered around in the park behind the cathedral, got a few morning shots, and sat for a while in one of the chapels, enjoying the brightness of the stained glass and the play of trees' shadows on that cool windy bright morning.

Famous art

YSS has been nice enough to give us (well, "give" us) student passes to the Louvre, and I decided to take mine for a spin yesterday. The place is HUGE but I made it through the majority of the first floor in all three wings. It'll have to be more than a week before I go back again -- famous art overload!

Here are several interesting details I saw. You've seen all the famous stuff already anyway. Please excuse the folks who occasionally wandered into my photos.

"OMG MY STATUE IS REAL"

You have no idea how many people were squashing me.





Why yes, this is the original Code of Hammurabi. I walked into a room and there it was!

My home church for the summer...

...is Notre Dame de Paris. My only real Catholic experience prior to this was one mass at Harvard, and they had a band, which Notre Dame certainly doesn't have. But what it does have is a fantastic organist who manages to improvise links between sections of the liturgy that sound like the very visible (and fragrant) clouds of incense filling the crossing at the same time.

I've been attending vespers there daily. It nests ritual within ritual, adding a regularity to my days that I had been missing. It also gives me a place in this strange city that is in some small way mine, and growing more familiar. The service is in French with a bit of Latin, but as a result of the liturgy it's nearly all singing and silence (or, rather, organ), which means I don't need to listen to anyone read or preach too much in French (my theological vocabulary is pretty small, but it's growing). One of my favorite parts about daily worship at the cathedral, though, is the opportunity to experience the structure as more than an artifact or historical object, which is the primary dimension of my class. Instead of just passing through it staring and snapping photos -- of which I am typically VERY guilty -- I can inhabit it for half an hour each day, trying it on, contemplating the centuries of people who have likewise stood and sat and walked and prayed in what they regarded as exceptionally sacred space. In a way the cathedral is an extension of the worship ritual, or maybe it's the other way around.

By now I can sing and chant in French and Latin along with everyone else (certainly better than the bemused tourists who find themselves in the nave by accident), and I can tell when the cantors mess up (which they sometimes do!). It's all beautiful ritual and vestments and seamless worship leading; even the incense is impressive when it rises through the crossing in a huge cloud from the wide burner in front of the altar as we sing que ma prière devant toi s’élève comme l’encens, et mes mains pour l’offrande du soir. On the downside it's almost too seamless, too businesslike, and a completely different group of people arrives for each mass or office every day.

The most interesting part of it is being able to immerse myself in unfamiliar ritual day after day, dwelling in a dramatic and dynamic architectural/liturgical demarcation of sacred space, repeating and repeating the ritual pour les siècles des siècles as we sing over and over, from age to age. Ritual is pretty powerful stuff -- as is inhabiting someone else's for a few days or weeks or months, no matter what your own theological convictions (or lack thereof) may be. And if it isn't even in your own language? Even more fun!

P.S. Happy Bastille Day. I think (hope?) someone's lighting recreational explosives a few blocks away.

One large chateau

On Saturday the two classes went to Vaux-le-Vicomte, a Versailles-era chateau in the countryside about an hour from Paris. Though it seems that only the ground floor of the chateau has been restored (along with the cellars) and half of that is an exhibit about the fall from political grace of Vaux-le-Vicomte's builder, the exterior was quite impressive, particularly the huge gardens. They feature sculpted shrubbery, optical illusions, and lots of fountains and other bodies of water. Just when you think you're close to the final fountains and can climb up to view the chateau from the rear, you realize that you actually have to walk all the way around "the skillet" -- a 3/4-mile-long canal. I bet the garden's designer is laughing in his grave thinking about all the people he fools. Because of course when you've walked around and enjoyed the view, the only way back to the chateau is to walk all the way around the water again.

After a lavish and delicious dinner in the restaurant in the former stables, we returned to the chateau for a candlelight stroll.

Tall pointy national symbols

If there were to be a faceoff between the Washington Monument and the Eiffel Tower... sorry, Washington Monument, you would lose. The Eiffel Tower is dramatic.

It's structural.

It's graceful.

And it's very large. (Although I suppose the Washington Monument is too.)