Sights and Sense from Paris and the Riviera

I offer photos from my first trip to Europe, December-January, 2011-2012 to Paris and the Mediterranean Coast to its south.  See the Louvre, Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Riviera, Monaco, and Italy.

A digital migrant rather than a digital native, I had trouble making, and especially uploading this video.  If you use Windows Movie Maker, as I did, be sure to "finish" your video by saving it to you computer and playing it once before you try to put it online.  My video's file extension is "wmv."  Uploading took my computer about 30 minutes.  During uploading, my computer showed frequent flashes of percentage uploaded.

If your computer shows alternately "Done" and a flash of those little in-progress lights, then it is not uploading.  A couple hours of such non-uploading that told me to return to Movie Maker and save my video according to instructions I found online.   I had forgotten the instructions after having found them online to ease uploading my first video, also on this blog.  A digital native, mainly someone under 30, would remember such instructions.  I, 50, should have written them down.  I hope to remember them this time.

The photos remind me how different that trip was than any other trip I took, including Newfoundland, Canada's Atlantic, Pacific, and Hudson Bay Coasts, the BC Inside Passage from Vancouver Island to Prince Rupert, from Miami to Ottawa, from Quebec to Maine and back to Edmonton via the US Midwest, and the Mackenzie Valley.  Only in Montreal and St. Augustine's, Florida did I find buildings centuries old, such as I found in France.

The 1700s English poet Alexander Pope's "Essay on Criticism" lampoons the typical young English noble who caps his education with "a European tour:"  "and Europe saw him, too."  I suppose "Europe saw me too," another unilingual North American seeking antique culture often called superior to that of the New World.

Pope's England hanged children for stealing bread, France's many cathedrals are more relics of serfdom and Catholic fascism than art objects, despite 1600s English poet John Milton's retort to a Puritan's objections to a cathedral:  "but it is beautiful."

I found nature beautiful in Europe:  waves crashing on the Mediterranean shore at Ventimiglia, Italy; orange and lemon trees growing throughout nearby Menton, France; coastal cliffs at Monaco farther west; and even in Paris, gardens wild and coiffed, and a sea of people and languages.  We are part of nature, which will outlast us, our cathedrals, and our geologically-puny debate about Old and New World culture.

See France, or don't.  Do get up each day, look at the sky, and marvel at your brief chance to observe and understand something of the universe, distant and close, durable and mutable, before you die and revert to the stardust whence you came.  Nothing is permanent, despite delusions entertained by builders of religions, cathedrals, art, and blogs.  Be not depressed, but inspired by impermanence: revel in your  experiences, observations, knowledge, acquaintances, and collective actions, the best guarantors of justice.