ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ

I first heard about Père Lachaise years ago, in college, while reading an article in Rolling Stone that mentioned that Jim Morrison is buried there. I was curious about this vast necropolis, but I never got to visit it until the spring of this year. I was there again today. I did not visit Marcel Proust again this time.

We got to the gate before 9 a.m. The light was beautiful and almost no one was there except a few workmen tending graves and a couple of guys who wandered in the same direction as us to see you know who, which is where we went to first--my friend wanted to see this famous tomb and we had a plane to catch.

I first visited Paris when I was 12, and after college I went four or five more times, but it was only this year that I traveled with people whose idea of Paris was similar to mine and who were inclined to explore it accordingly.

I have spent so many years not traveling that I devoted too much of 2007 to making up for lost time this year. I went to Europe three times, including Paris twice this year. It's a bit disorienting to hear about Père Lachaise and then not have a chance to visit it for a quarter of a century and then this is a year in which I visited Jim Morrison’s grave twice. By the way, I have never bought a Doors album. It's strange that considering all the famous people who are interred there it is Jim Morrison who seems to have put the place on the map. (Georges Bizet, Maria Callas (sort of), and Frédéric Chopin are buried there, along with a lot of other notable musicians.)

There are two people that I know of who I saw in life who are now interred in Père Lachaise. I saw Stéphane Grappelli perform three times. His ashes now rest in the Père Lachaise's columbarium. I never saw Michel Petrucciani perform, but I once saw him being pushed in a wheelchair on the Upper West Side. There are maybe others, but I haven't thoroughly combed the list of Père Lachaise's residents.

I got to visit the grave of a childhood hero of mine, Jean-François Champollion--who lies in an easily found area where paths converge on a circle (one of which leads toward Jim Morrison). And, after threading our way up through quite a hillside of graves with only a so-so map to guide us, I found Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), a painter who I learned about and admired in high school (although I had seen his paintings when I was a child but didn't remember his name). I was stuck by the contrasts that time wreaks. Chopin’s music sounds alive now (but, of course, music is an art that is experienced in living time, although I guess all art requires the devotion of some amount of time on the part of the experiencer). Stepping into the little walled garden of Corot's grave I thought of the vividness and beauty of his paintings. But Corot's grave is overgrown with weeds and the stones have shifted and his bronze bust is patinaed bordering on rust. There are thousands of graves here that are not standing up well to the onslaught of time. Ars longa, as they say. I have two translations of À la recherche du temps perdu: I can look at any page at random and even in translation the writing is beautiful and the tone and ideas are not musty or undergoing the kind of degradation that crushes stones. Then again, the forces that have been shifting the masonry of Corot's grave since 1875 might not amount to a millimeter a year of pushing.

When we came out the corner door, the one near the Père Lachaise Mètro stop, the crèpe store was opening up. I had a Nutella and coconut crèpe and an amazingly great café crème. There are many things to appreciate in life.

With my phrasebook in hand I asked the man behind the counter where a post office was--and I understood him! There was one nearby. I stopped at an ATM to get some more euros and asked the lady at the post office for the stamps I needed to send my postcards. This very useful question was not in my semi-useful phrasebook. However, my butchered French was sufficiently understandable and I got what I assume are the necessary stamps.

We then had to catch our ride to the airport to fly to Berlin, a city I have never been to.

[Postscript: "Κατά τον δαίμονα εαυτού" is apparently loosely translated as "True to his own spirit"; like you, I have no idea where this phrase came from and am curious about its source. By the way, the phrase is apparently in Ancient Greek, not Modern Greek.]