alexpgp | LJ Idol 6.4: Moments of Devastating Beauty

I do not know when or where I had picked up the old, red-covered Baedecker guide to Paris, but when the book managed to appear in my hands just a few days before my wife and I departed for that city Hemingway described as "a moveable feast," I paused and put it into my carry-on bag for the trip.

"Don't you think we'll need something a bit more current?" asked Galina, my wife. She had a point, as the book had been published just after the Armistice, in 1918.

I smiled and replied, "Some things never change. Who knows? Maybe the book will come in handy."

Galina had managed to find a really great package deal for a one-week vacation in Paris, and whenever we left our hotel during that week, the Baedecker was in my pocket.

At times, the book was of little use and we were thrown on our own resources. That happened the afternoon we spent at the Musée d'Orsay, a museum housed in a what was once a railroad terminal. Renovated in the mid-1980s, the museum now contained the world's largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces.

I will never forget how, off in one corner of the museum, I ran across an exhibit that was almost totally enclosed, so constructed as to protect the art work inside from ambient light. The sign near the entrance described the works within to have been drawn by Edgar Degas. I'd heard of the name, and vaguely recalled having seen reproductions in books, so I went in.

Only a few steps from the outside light, my eyes locked onto an image of a ballet dancer balanced on one leg. She appears luminous, lit from below my vantage point, wearing sprays of red flowers attached to her waist and the front of her white bodice. She floats.

Behind her, I can see other dancers and a man wearing what appears to be a tuxedo. They are offstage, in the wings, partially obscured. I can almost hear music.

I take a closer look, to try to figure out how this image was created. It seems so... right. I notice it's done in pastels. Incredible work!

Then my breath comes back to me, in great heaves, and I spend some time putting air back in my lungs. The sight of Degas' ballerina had literally taken my breath away. (And here I had always thought it was a figure of speech!) The rest of the exhibit was equally amazing, though I made a point of continuing to breathe until I again emerged into the main hall.

At other times, the little book was amazingly useful, since neither the monuments nor the streets in the center of Paris had changed much over the years. Galina and I made our way around Paris mostly on foot and we took in the usual tourist sights: the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. During such times, my Baedecker was always close at hand.

The old guidebook had an extensive writeup about the Louvre, too, although it described the museum as it had been about three-quarters of a century before. It was interesting for me to compare what was back then with what had been back when, and I took a special interest in items that - though they had been moved in 1939 to a safe locale far away from guns and bombs - were now back in the same place.

Principal among these was the statue of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which stood at the top of a flight of stairs one climbs not long after entering the museum (the Daru staircase, according to the Baedecker). Though she is headless and armless, and despite my having seen pictures of the statue in books, my first glimpse of Nike - which is her name in Greek - left me standing in the middle of the stairs, simply awestruck.

If the Degas pastel left me breathless, Nike left me overwhelmed. She was beautiful! I could imagine - I saw - her whole, with her head and arms lifted in celebration, her wings lending an angelic aspect, and an oncoming breeze pressing her garment against her figure and billowing the trailing fabric.

I felt as if my legs, my heart, and my head no longer reliably belonged to my body. I stood and looked and looked, until finally Galina came back down the stairs, with a worried look on her face.

"Are you okay?" she asked. When all I could do was nod weakly, she grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. I snapped out of whatever state I was in and we continued up the stairs, arm in arm, where I could not help but peek again at Nike before turning the corner.

We spent very nearly the entire day at the Louvre, and I referred to the Baedecker quite often, to amuse myself. The paintings of the Dutch masters of the 17th century had moved; those of Raphael, Veronese, and Tintoretto hadn't. Among other works that had changed location within the Louvre was da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which expressed a quality that seemed to speak to me across the centuries, even from behind bulletproof glass. Though I was ill-equipped to comprehend it, all I knew was that I was somehow a better person for having seen Leonardo's La Gioconda.

The week passed as all good times do, all too quickly. The Baedecker went into my carry-on for the trip home, along with some souvenirs of our trip and the usual odds and ends. During the flight, I reached into my bag so I could open the book and reinforce my pleasant memories of Paris, but as I grasped it, the binding literally fell apart.

"There is no friend as loyal as a book," said Hemingway, and I smiled as I put the rotted pages of the guidebook back in my bag. The compact volume had shown ultimate loyalty in serving its function, old and creaky as it was, during its one last trip to Paris.