Following the Sun (24 page)

“I tell you one bad thing though,” the old man said. “Americans fight too much each other. There was a black regiment here. Each night they come to town to look for girls. Then the white regiment comes in. Then they fight each other. And then …,” he waved his hand in dismissal and blew out his cheeks, “Police …”

This man told me, after he heard my plans to cross to England at Le Havre, that there was going to be a ferry strike and I wouldn't make it. He said he knew many fishermen who would take me over, bicycle and all. But I only half believed him and didn't take him up on the offer.

“Well good luck to you,” he said, shaking my hand again, and patting my back. “And my best to your mother.”

This last was a strange addition. I hadn't said a word to him about my mother, although, oddly enough, she was leaving soon for Denmark and I had planned to call her there in a few weeks and had been thinking about her that day.

Things began to go downhill after Vermeil. I had to ride on a busy road to get into Le Mans and then I made the mistake of booking a room in a 1930s Bauhaus-style hotel. I salvaged what was left of the day by wandering around the old city and thinking of the last days of Eleanor's son Richard, and the slow, sad end of the troubadours. Le Mans was about the northernmost point for the southern-based troubadours, and was the border with the tougher, French-dominated culture of the north.

The next day I learned that there really was a ferry strike and my chances of getting to England were pretty poor, at least for a day or two. I spent a nasty day wheeling up to Le Havre anyway, and learned even worse news. It would be three maybe four or even five days before the strike was resolved, rumor had it. And here I was stuck in the industrial port city squalor of the north under that gray English Channel sky, having so recently left the green pastures of the Loire and the Aquitaine. I went into a bad bar where sailors were drinking despondently, ordered a hot café crême, and tried to rethink my plans.

I couldn't think of a single good reason to hang around this part of the world waiting for labor and management to work out their differences when I was no more than an hour or so by train from Paris. If I was going to wait in a depressing smoky bar for a strike to end, I might as well wait in my old smoky stomping grounds on the Left Bank.

This thought alone improved my mood and by that evening I was on the train for the City of Light.

Nine

The City of Light

For a while during my student years and afterward, I had lived in Paris, near the Place Monge, and had sporadically attended the Sorbonne and involved myself in the international world of sometime students, radicals, and artists who inhabited the underbelly of the Left Bank. Like many American students I had originally come to Europe to attend university, but I liked it so much I stayed on and managed, albeit illegally, to find work to support myself. I gave away all my American clothes and attempted, by acquiring a smattering of European languages, to obscure my decidedly American identity.

This was the first time I had been back in the city in ten years and, as soon as I arrived, I went out to look for my old friends. Most of the people I knew would gather every day at a place called the Café Saint Placide, and the morning after I got to Paris, I went there for coffee. Not surprisingly, except for a friendly waiter named Gilbert, everyone had departed for other adventures, and the café itself had declined sadly, I thought. It was bright and noisy and crowded with older, rough-looking types, none of whom I knew.

I had other, more established friends in the city, though, one of whom was a man named Chrétien Berger, whom I found in the phone book and called. Chrétien and I had worked together in a restaurant on Corsica and in the winter, back in Paris, almost every Sunday, he would invite me to his parents' apartment for dinner. They must have had some money since they lived in an airy sunny place near the Champs-Elysées and always managed to put on a fine five-course meal, sometimes with champagne. Chrétien had a pretty cousin named Micheline and often, after our midday meal, the three of us would go over to the Jardin des Plantes and stroll arm in arm.

Chrétien was overjoyed to hear from me and later that first day we got together, rehashed the old times and made more plans to meet again for dinner with Micheline. I spent the rest of that day and the next wandering around my former haunts. I went out to the zoo, and the Bois de Boulogne, and I found a gardener at the Jardin des Plantes whom I had befriended and who remembered me and chatted with him about flowers and trees, and then I went back to the Saint Placide and chatted up the waiter Gilbert. After that, I went over to Notre Dame and looked at the famous stained glass window in the south transept.

The immense expanse of glass was glowing as usual, even in the half light of the cloudy afternoon beyond the cathedral walls. There were a few informed tourists there who knew exactly what they were looking for and had trained the binoculars on the details.

Stained glass windows were a crucial element in the spiritual foundation of the design of the interiors of Gothic cathedrals. They had the effect of bathing the interior architecture of these sacred buildings with a subdued, colored light that tended to dissolve the dark weight of the stone building material. The great wheels, or rose-patterned circular windows, were always set at the center of the main and transept façades as a climax to the long axial vistas down the forestlike aisles of the shaded interiors. This use, or reuse, or re-forming of light was an expression of the metaphysics of the Middle Ages, which held that light was the most noble of all the natural phenomena, the closest physical approximation of pure spirit, an expression of spirit embodied. According to scholars, the idea originated with Plato and his correlation of goodness and wisdom with sunlight. The Neo-Platonists and later St. Augustine transformed this concept and saw light as a divine intellect that enlightens the mind. The idea is expressed repeatedly in the great work of the age, Dante's
Paradiso
, which concerns itself with the theme of
la luce divina
or divine light.

In spite of the fact that Paris is supposed to be the City of Light, as it often does in northern France in spring, it began to rain the next day, and as I had in Madrid, I began killing time in some of the museums that I had overlooked or merely perused indifferently during my callow student years.

On my way over to the Louvre I walked through the Place de la Concorde, where there is an Egyptian obelisk that was lifted from the ruins of the temple of Luxor, and all that day and even into the next I kept running into little museum rooms stuffed with remnants of the first and in some ways the foremost civilization of the sun.

The obelisk at the Place de la Concorde once stood at the main pylon gateway to the great temple, constructed over 3,300 years ago by Ramses II, the king who helped establish the cult of the divine pharaoh by erecting statues of himself as a god throughout the country. Pharaohs were, of course, at the top of the social and political hierarchy, like kings and queens the world around, but in Egypt the pharaoh was an essential part of the cosmos, an integral part of what was known as
ma'at
, or the divine order of things. The pharaoh fulfilled the role of the god Osiris while on earth, the generative force of nature, but more importantly he was the living descendant of the sun god Ra, who was recognized as the preeminent god of all the many deities of the ancient Egyptians.

Everyday in ancient Egypt, Ra floated up out of the east in his celestial boat, sailed across the sky, and then descended into Duat, the dark region below the earth. Here he debarked, boarded a different vessel, his night boat, and began a voyage from west to east, sailing toward morning. As with the Maya, this night journey was known to be dangerous for the god of the sun. He was often threatened by a giant serpent as he made his way eastward, and demons and the souls of the damned would begin wailing and calling out as he passed. Undeterred, he sailed on through the dark seas. Toward midnight, he would come upon the body of the slain god Osiris, who supplied the power of life and rebirth to those living above. At this point, Ra and Osiris intermingled with one another. Osiris became the sun, and the sun became Osiris, and thereby gained his regenerative powers. Then Ra voyaged onward toward the gates of dawn and soon approached the horizon. Those on earth could now see his light, the light of predawn, but they could not see Ra himself until he changed to his day boat and sailed above the horizon, now visible as the solar disc.

This, for the Egyptians, was the great miracle of the solar transit, this reforming. It was a reaffirmation of the triumph of life over death and a critical aspect of their religion. Ra was the most powerful god in the Egyptian pantheon; he manifested himself in the form of many of the other gods and assumed many names. Prayers to him are inscribed on stelae throughout the land, often in the same hymnal language, “Hail to thee, Ra—Oh primeval one, coming into being of thyself, lord of what thou hast created—”

Even though there was a plethora of deities in the ancient world, the Egyptians knew that the sun, the singular celestial object that rose each day, throwing off heat and light, was the prime mover, the first force, and the source of all life on earth. But after the ascension of the pharaoh Akhenaton at the end of the eighteenth dynasty in the fourteenth century
B.C.
, some 3,360 years ago, all the myriad gods of Egypt were diminished, the sun became the one true god, and the first monotheistic religion was born.

Akhenaton assumed the kingship in Thebes when he was still a young man, and immediately, in the first five years of his reign, began to reorder the cultural and religious landscape of all of Egypt. He began to question the role of the other gods and determined that they were failing. In their place, he established an all-powerful god, the living Ra, he “—who decrees life, the lord of sunbeams, maker of brightness,” in the words of one hymn. The great temple of Amon at Thebes languished. The temples to the other gods fell into disrepair, and the priests, who played such an important role in the Egyptian bureaucracy, had little to do. In the fifth year of his reign Akhenaton officially decreed, in so many words, that there was but one god, and Ra was his name. All other gods were deemed of little value and banished.

Akhenaton moved the royal city from Thebes to the new city of Amarna and reordered the courts. He laid out the city on a plain and oriented the streets toward double peaks in the east through which the rising sun would appear each dawn. Under the new religion, the sun god was no longer depicted as a falcon or a human form. He was abstracted and depicted as a disc emitting rays that formed the ankh symbol, the hieroglyph for life. Under the new religious philosophy, the artists and artisans focused on new themes. Formal ritualistic events in the underworld or the courts gave way to naturalistic representations of the family life of the pharaoh and his beautiful queen, Nefertiti.

Ever since the first discoveries at Amarna, and well into the 1960s, scholars and interpreters of this individualistic reformer have swept through the world of archeologists and spread into the fields of history and religion and even psychology. Freud, for example, interpreted the rise of Akhenaton as a way of explaining the later development of Mosaic monotheism. Akhenaton was seen by some religious scholars as a forerunner of Christ—not an illogical comparison, since Akhenaton was wont to describe himself as the son of god—he who made Ra's will known on earth. Historians have also compared the sun cult of Ra as the forerunner of the pre-Christian solar cult known as the
sol invictus deus
, the Invincible or Unconquerable Sun, which was established as the state religion of Rome under Emperor Aurelian in the third century. By any standards Akhenaton's new state religion appears to be the first example of monotheism, predating the Hebrew Jehovah.

But it was not to last. The thousand-year evolution of the order of Egyptian society and politics was weakened during Akhenaton's reign. Unlike many of his predecessors, he appears to have been a considerate man, slow to strike down his enemies, of which, after a few years of rule, there were many. He allowed insults to mount. He relished the home and the hearth, his children, his famously beautiful wife. He reveled in arts and jubilees, gave traitors and rebels a second chance, refused to send out retaliatory expeditions, and in his last years never left his palace, poisoned, some historians speculate, by a slow-acting magic. He died in 1353
B.C.
at the age of thirty-two.

In spite of the rain I went out toward the Bois de Boulogne for a walk, got caught in another downpour, and ended up at the Marmottan Museum, which had recently acquired a collection of Monet paintings, many of them from Monet's garden home at Giverny. Also hanging here, at least at that time (later it was stolen), was a painting called “Impression—Sunrise.” It was this canvas, with daubs of broken color, which close up looked like a mottle of short multicolored brush strokes, but which at a distance merged into one smooth landscape, that gave the group that painted in this manner the name Impressionists.

I remember when I was younger wandering through gallery upon gallery of some museum that was organized chronologically. I passed through hall after hall of dark religious subjects and somber nobility and then entered into a room where the Impressionists were collected. Suddenly the gallery burst into natural light. The effect was dazzling, I literally felt as if I had stepped outdoors on a sunny morning.

No one knows exactly why this group of French painters should have chosen to go against the grain of the French Academy and begin, among other new styles, to break a scene up into a mass of short primary-colored brush strokes, but there were a number of scientific breakthroughs that were taking place in optics at the time that may have driven these artists to look at the world with a fresh eye. One of these was the invention of the camera and the development of photography. But it was during this same period that the chemical basis of light was revealed. In 1859 two German researchers had improved spectrum analysis dramatically and, for the first time, the complex chemical basis of colors came to be understood. As a result, the chemical makeup of the sun could be read through the analysis of the colors of the prism. The great surprise, to artists, chemists, geologists, and astronomers alike, was that the chemistry of the sun and the chemistry of the earth were similar. This suggested—as the ancient mystics appear to have known all along—that the sun was the parent of the earth.