My first visit to Paris was a memorable one. The time was early November 2002, about five weeks after I had arrived in London to begin my year abroad. My parents were visiting, and after spending time in England, they took the train across the channel and into Paris. I followed them a few days later and spent two nights there.
Of course I was amazed. I can still recall arriving in the city and rounding the corner by the Place de la Concorde onto the Champs-Elysées by night, peering out from the taxi window, taking in the majesty of the place. Eating lunch in the gardens of the Rodin Museum on an unseasonably warm autumn day was a surprising pleasure. There were times as I crossed the Seine and gazed across the open boulevards that I felt a great longing; there was something irrefutably romantic in the cityscape.
Though it was a brief first visit, it was remarkable. I left after only 48 hours, taking the train back to London, as I had classes to attend. My family would be returning the following day.
As I sat on the train looking out the window at the landscape of northern France, rapidly sliding across it, I felt such loneliness. The meadows and the pastures beckoned me, and I was somehow powerless. There was such sorrow in the moment. I curled up on my seat and clenched my eyes. To have lived this way and not lived at all.
In his novel Howard's End, E.M. Forster wrote, "Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes.... Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty."
Drifting across the plains of France, I felt this sentiment strongly. My life is one of privilege. Indeed, it is for all of us as undergraduates. We are privileged with four years of academic inquiry; we are privileged with the opportunity to study in foreign places; we are privileged with the chance to know one another at a time of such tremendous self-exploration. To have lived this way--and only now to fully understand it. There is great power in this thought.
In Saul Bellow's work Seize the Day, Dr. Tamkin the loquacious psychologist with a head for crooked financial dealings, tries to convince the book's protagonist, who is beset by the troubles and purposelessness of his own life, that his actions have greater meaning. "I'd bet you any amount of money that the facts about you are sensational," he said. "People forget how sensational the things are that they do. They don't see it on themselves. It blends into the background of their daily life."
So it has been for much of these past four years.
They have been times of love and heartache, acute learning and drunken debauchery... true friendship and painful retreat. There are moments when the bubbling cauldron of such romance overflows and seeps into our consciousness. Senior year is full of these moments. But usually the frenzied nature of college life keeps this reality at bay--and the magnificence of these days passes us with frightful velocity.
Well after my train had arrived in London and I had attended those long-forgotten classes, I walked down late at night in the darkness to the Thames near my London flat. Above me the lights atop Tower Bridge had been turned off and only the outline of the great structure was visible by the light of the moon. There was no reason for optimism at a passing moment like this one; it too would be gone. There was only a sense of responsibility to myself to look around as well as forward.
Dean Chapman is a Trinity senior and Recess editor.
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