I love this view of Paris by Vincent van Gogh. I believe we are standing up at Montmartre and at the Church of the Secra Cour over looking the city. The year is 1886 but it might as well be 2014. Anyone who knows and loves and understands Paris knows that IT is the Eternal City and no where else. In Paris, one can go and have a chocolate and a scone at ones favorite neighborhood café in Anvers with the charming waiter André, and not return for 7 years and when one returns to that favorite spot in Anvers to have a chocolate and a scone, André will still be there and he will say, Bienvenue! Monsieur Clark. Bon Journèe!” This image by Vincent so expressively captures the classical, timeless, intransient essence of Paris, that seems to those who live there and those who understand it, exempt from temporality. This city-scape so marvelously alludes to the richness of the mood of the city, what there is to love about Paris, a character, and a cast of several million characters, each so distinctive; it is literally its own universe on its own sphere, caught somewhere else in time. We do not see the sun overhead, passing the day by, reminding us of the clock, ticking by, minute-by-minute. But Vincent, master of symbolic expression, captures the monuments to the monumental people and figures that made the past of this great city, and defines its present... and the stillness and permanence in this frozen moment of existential detachment and its own disparate reality, very real to all who dwell here, and to those who are included. And for those who visit to see the monuments and to shop and to pass the grand boulevards, they will leave and take only them only that, but for the rest, Paris is more than that, and is forever part of reality, it is one’s reality, and eternally in one’s heart. Diane P. Stewart
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 00:01:47 +0000
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