St Paul, Eze, and the Question of Peace

Eiffel was as crowded as it can get, and the wait as long as advertised, and for all the effort it wasn't quite worth it. The cultural dilemma of France is easy to see: people want peace, and they are very clear that they won't work past the point where peace is threatened. Rules exist to help them survive, but they're operational rules, not social ones — museums built with a supposedly neutral agenda still end up narrating the perspective of whoever was strongest at the time. The complete truth stays hidden, everywhere, not just here.

St Paul is proof that art has its own way of pulling like-minded people together across the world, and that the people outside that circle grow jealous of the harmony it produces. The more who try to join the story, the more bigotry creeps back in, and a way of life slowly calcifies into rules and regulation. The galleries had pieces that made me want to keep looking, and I'm not an artist, but I know that feeling is the only real test that a piece of art is good.

Eze village, from the top, gives you a view I can only describe by admitting I'm already distorting it — imagining someone reading this who has never been there, and wondering what disappointment I'm adding by being pragmatic about a place that deserves more romance than I'm giving it. Our history books do exactly this at scale: they are all just the perspective of someone who liked what happened and gave it their full-hearted endorsement. I'd go back. I'd spend a month wandering the countryside instead of visiting and leaving, sit in the cafés, actually talk to people, and give up the tourist's habit of only ever passing through.

There came a point in that trip where being number one stopped mattering, and simply being good at what you do was enough. The common man in France is still toiling for his daily bread, but doesn't seem to need to lose himself in the process. Ancient India arrived at something similar, in its own register, through its own artistic instincts. Maybe the lesson from both is the same one: let individuals do what they need to, keep enough of the culture worth keeping, and stop mistaking constant forward motion for peace.