Warped...

A strange day.

Got some work, did it, sent it back. More promised for tomorrow (or maybe the right word is "threatened," as the promised files are in PowerPoint).

Emptied the rooms next door in preparation for carpet cleaning, though I will rely on the cleaners to deal with the heavy items.

Achieved 90% completion of bookshelf culling/ordering (which does not take into account a number of boxes remaining in our storage "room" and in the basement in New York).

And yet... it doesn't really feel as if I've gotten anything at all accomplished today.

Cheers...

The Paris Baedecker...

I put up an old Baedecker guide today, picked up I don't know where, for Switzerland. It reminded me of another old Baedecker I owned, published in 1915 or thereabouts, for Paris, The City of Lights.

I took that Baedecker with us when Galina and I took a one-week vacation to Paris back in March 1991, shortly after singer-actor-director Serge Gainsbourg died. I mention Gainsbourg because when we visited the Montparnasse Cemetery - I wanted to see the final resting place of world chess champion Alexander Alekhine - Gainsbourg's grave was still piled high with fresh flowers. But I get ahead of myself.

One thing you can generally depend upon about city streets - especially downtown city streets - and that's that they don't change much over the years. That meant that the street maps in my old Baedecker were still useful. Galina and I walked quite a bit around the center of Paris, and we took in the usual tourist sights.

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 was back when, and I took a special interest in items that - though they may have been moved in the intervening years - were (back?) in the same place.

Principal among these was the statue of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which stands at the top of a flight of stairs one climbs not long after entering the museum. Though she is headless and armless, and despite my having doubtless seen pictures of the statue in books previously, my first glimpse of Nike - which is her name in Greek - left me standing in the middle of the stairs, simply awestruck. I stood and looked and looked, until finally Galina came back down the stairs to snap me out of what she said appeared to be a trance.

There turned out to be not a large crowd in the room in which da Vinci's Mona Lisa was on exhibit, so we popped in for a look. (I detest crowded exhibits. It is likely I was permanently scarred as a child in this regard when I was immersed in a crowd jostling to glimpse Michelangelo's Pieta back during the '63-'64 New York World's Fair. I vaguely remember a momentary flash of white marble seen between the heads of the people in front of me while we all stood on a moving walkway in the Vatican Pavilion.)

Unlike my reaction to much art from the Renaissance - yawn - there was something about the painting behind the bullet-and-goodness-knows-what-else-proof glass that touched me. A clarity, I think, that spoke to me across the centuries, though I was ill-equipped to comprehend it.

I referred to the Baedecker on and off during that museum visit, to amuse myself. The paintings of the Dutch masters of the 17th century had moved; those of Raphael, Veronese, and Tintoretto apparently hadn't.

The book also documented the famous lights buried at the aforementioned Montparnasse Cemetery. I found it interesting that while I recognized some of the names in the book - Charles Baudelaire, César Franck, Guy de Maupassant - almost everyone else cited was completely unknown to me. It seemed to me to be a severe case of sic transit gloria mundi.

Of course, the book could not list the personalities who were interred there since its publication, but a photocopied handout from the caretaker took care of that. Besides the grave of Alekhine, who died in 1946, I recall finding the resting place of Alfred Dreyfus, who was the focus of a notorious scandal involving treason, a government cover-up, and the publication of an open letter that rocked the establishment of the time.

The week went by quickly, and Galina and I had a great time. I took the red-leather bound Baedecker with me everywhere. As we packed to go home, I picked it up, only to have the binding literally fall apart. The effect was similar to dropping a deck of playing cards. It was as if the book had mustered its energy to serve its purpose one last time, and then given up the ghost.

I imagined it a fitting end to an illustrious guidebook.

Cheers...